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The whole Jericho Writers team agrees that, at this year’s London Festival of Writing, our Friday Night Live competition was a little bit special. For a start, it was on a Saturday – but leaving the misnomer aside, we were bowled over by the stellar standard of the entries we received.

Anyone who was in the dining room that night would surely agree that our finalists – although writing in diverse genres – had one thing in common. Their work was accomplished, affecting and intriguing.

A month on, we wanted to reflect on what made our entrants’ best work so impressive and look at some of the more constructive feedback our judges had to offer.

What we loved

Strong opening lines

Giving your novel a killer first line sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not as simple as it might seem. Opening sentences shoulder immense pressure, often doing multiple things at once. They tell us something about our protagonist and the world they live in, hint at events that will be central to the story and strike a tone that will carry through the novel, setting up its genre and style.

We loved finalist Tori Howe’s arch, amusing line: “Our Christmas tree was definitely dead”, as well as Davina Bhanabhai’s devastating opener: “I spend my forty-fifth birthday identifying the dead body of my only child”.

Want to nail your own novel’s first line? Remember that this doesn’t have to be the bit of your book you write first! Hitting upon the perfect opening sentence is the sort of thing you might find easier to achieve in retrospect, when your draft is well underway and your characters and their world are firmly established.

Voice

What makes a strong narrative voice? It’s a question we get asked frequently, and – slightly annoyingly – the honest answer is you just know it when you read it.

Voice was something our Friday Night Live judges commented on frequently this year, highlighting the individuality and authenticity of many entrants’ writing. Sophie Holme’s entry, which made the live final, was a perfect example. Rich with wry wit, the first 500 words of her memoir are also shot through with a melancholy that hints at the darker themes her work explores – among them, the state of psychiatric care in the UK.

If you’re keen to develop your narrative voice, confidence is key. Know, right down to your bones, who your characters are, what the stakes are for them and how what happens in their world will shape them. Then you can tell their story with the sort of authority that resonates with readers – in a voice that, without needing to shout, demands their attention.

World-building... without info dumping

We had lots of fantastical, spooky and speculative entries to this year’s competition – and the best among them managed to establish the worlds their characters lived in without clumsily offloading key information. In her romantasy extract, finalist Isabel Norris made the smart move of drip-feeding just enough facts to let the reader orient themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, striking the perfect balance between providing details and provoking questions.

Friday Night Live winner Kate den Rooijen, in her speculative YA entry, achieved the same effect – allowing readers to conclude that her main character was dying at the same moment the protagonist realised this herself.

Things to think about

'Writing in'

Many of us do this, and it’s a very normal part of the writing process. For the uninitiated, ‘writing in’ is the act of producing scenes, or even whole chapters of a manuscript, whose (often unconscious) purpose is enabling you, the author, to work out who your characters are and what is going on with them.

The challenge is knowing when you’re writing in, and identifying those scenes or chapters as (gulp) potentially superfluous to the story you’re telling. Starting your novel in the right place is a skill – and to some extent it’s dependent on your ability to gauge how much ‘writing in’ content makes it into your final manuscript.

Our very best Friday Night Live entries this year boasted strong beginnings that took readers straight to the heart of action, setting, stakes and character, rather than explaining them. This is crucial for establishing a sense of pace and hooking your reader upfront.

Structure and style

We saw some Friday Night Live entries where judges praised “beautiful writing” but added that “the sentence structures chosen made it hard to follow”. In other cases, there was switching between tenses and points of view within extracts, which our judges found confusing.

Readers also said they found that, in a few cases, the genre of an entry didn’t quite tally with the style it was written in – often because the voice or narrative point of view felt jarring. It’s worth remembering that, if you’re writing a thriller, it needs to feel like a thriller from the very first page. Likewise, contemporary women’s fiction needs to open with a protagonist we can empathise with, in a setting readers will recognise. As one of today’s teenagers might put it: the vibes have to be right.

Over-writing

Finally, it’s no surprise that a small handful of our entries felt a little over-written. When you’re setting your work up to be judged, the temptation to keep embellishing it can be difficult to resist!

What is over-writing? It’s arguably a subjective concept, but it’s about using more words, more imagery and more bells and whistles than are needed. It can also be about making the same point in multiple ways when stating it simply would be more impactful.

Sometimes avoiding over-writing is about using one perfect word instead of five not-quite-right ones: getting to the heart of a feeling or experience in a way that feels true, rather than dressed up or manufactured.

Our advice? Don’t allow complex prose to obscure the point it’s supposed to be making. Ensure your words are meaningful, not just artfully arranged.

Our sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to enter this year’s competition. It was a privilege to read your work, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with next year.

Something a little different this week.

I’ve jabbered a lot in the past about the importance of nailing your elevator pitch: making sure that your basic novel concept is one that people feel the need to pick up and explore.

I think that’s not just commercially important. I think it’s artistically important too. It’s key to any genuinely great book.

I’ve also always said that the elevator pitch – that basic concept – is FOR YOU. It’s a mother with 100 daughters. The daughters arise anywhere your book concept touches the world. So, for example:

• Your query letter
• Your book blurb
• A two-line pitch on social media
• A conversation with an agent at our London Festival of Writing.

But also, for example:

• Your text itself
• Your opening page (and what it hints at in terms of the future)
• Choices you make about what and what not to include.

But also: 

• Your book cover
• Your website
• Your Twitter profile (I’m not going to call that company by a stupid name just to please an erratic billionaire)
• Your Facebook ads (ditto). 

Today, I thought it would be interesting to pick up the very last of those. Here, for example, is a Facebook ad for one of the Fiona books.

What’s the elevator pitch for that book? Well, all my pitches have two layers, I guess. There’s the series pitch (“Detective who used to think she was dead”). And there’s the individual book pitch, which in this case is something like “Dark religion + kidnap + remote Wales village”. That’s the pitch if you pick out the central ingredients. If you want a more conventional pitch, then “Woman, wearing bridal white, found dead in a country churchyard. Who is she? And why is she here?” 

I hope you feel that the image above connects adequately with the pitch. It’s not that they say the exact same thing, but they live happily together – like lemon and mint.

Nearly all my ads use the same colour set – yellow and white text, dark monochrome image – because that basic mixture says noirish crime, with strong hints of seriousness. (Yellow and black together convey danger – it’s one of the standard colour sets of warning signs and crime tape.) Also, of course, the more consistency in the ads, the more casual users start to notice the brand on repeat viewings. 

Here’s another ad for the same book: 

That’s a more direct expression of the elevator pitch, but they’re both playing on the same basic turf. At the moment, both ads have roughly the same link click-through rate, so I can’t yet say which one will come out on top. 

Or take another example, this time for the ($0.99) series opener. 

Here, the elevator pitch is all about my damaged detective – who’s kinda nuts and used to think she was dead. The ad that’s worked best so far is this one: 

The actual image there is pretty much bog-standard: tough, crimey woman + moody landscape. But the ad text tells you who that woman is: “Brilliant, quirky, damaged, fascinating.” 

Again, that’s not a direct statement of the pitch, but it’s certainly a very clear echo. It makes you want to know more… and when you get to the actual book sales page, the basic offer expands from that exact starting point. The journey from ad to book page, to “look inside”, to purchase, should all be very clear, very consistent. 

Another ad that has done well is this one: 

That ad offers a landscape – a somewhat foreboding, Welsh-looking one. That establishes genre (moody, Celtic noir, crime), but it doesn’t say much directly about the pitch. But again, “Wales’ strangest detective” slaps the elevator pitch right there, up top. 

Both those ads have done better than one that uses a really positive review as its central element. Take this ad, for example: 

That ad has done OK… but it’s not been any kind of star performer. And I think that’s because its relationship with the elevator pitch is just too murky. OK, so Fiona Griffiths stars in some crime books. We’ve never met anyone like her. But… what? She’s super-girly? She’s a klutz? She’s half-robot? She speaks Ukrainian? She mostly works as a part-time hairdresser? 

In terms of ads that really deliver readers – that is, ads that command the user’s attention from first sight through to completion of purchase – it’s been my experience that the pitch matters. That’s why your original concept matters so much, even before you’ve started to write a word. It’s why that concept matters so much when you’re selling, not just with the text you deploy, but the image composition too. 

That’s it from me, my furry companion. May the grass lie softly for you and the air taste sweet. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY - Explanations 

Do you have any visual material for your book? If so, let’s hear your pitch and see your visuals. That’ll be fun! 

If you don’t have anything available yet (and you really don’t need to), then just give us your pitch and sketch out for us what a book cover or Facebook ad might look like.

When you're ready, log in and post yours here.

Til soon. 

Harry

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of insights into what it’s like to be part of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

This month feels like a deeply personal and challenging one: we’re spending the month covering character, in all its facets. I have a theory that this aspect of writing is where the maxim, “Write what you feel,” comes most to the fore. I see myself and my experiences in every main character I’ve ever written, to a greater or lesser extent. I hear my values in their dialogue. I recognise the resonance of my soul in theirs and, to be perfectly honest, I can’t actually imagine writing stories in any other way.  

I’m not talking about writing characters that match only my characteristics, my physical attributes, my socio-economic categorisation, my place of birth or the places I’ve chosen to live in. For instance, the two main characters in the manuscript I’m writing on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme are, respectively, a male, 60-year-old, ex-special forces vagrant with PTSD, and a 20-year-old orphaned woman, living in a Suffolk commune. Both have significant powers of clairvoyancy.  

This, to probably nobody’s surprise, is not my actual life experience. No, what I mean is that I want to populate my stories with people who connect me to the commonality we all share: the frailty, the bravery, the drag of secret shame, the lift of delicate hope, our mortality and the knowing, innate within, that at some point this life will end. Beneath everything, I believe we’re not all that different to one another.  

I have another theory that the characters who arrive for each of us writers are embodiments of a particular, and highly personal, call to romantic adventure. The types of characters that turn up for me are an embodiment of what adventure means to me. They’re configured according to what my next lesson is, my next challenge. Us writers, us artists, us humans – we’re not built for safety. I reckon we’re built for lives of progress and questing! The characters that have gathered in my imagination across the years are not mere chance or some random coincidence – they mean something to me. In pursuing them, getting to know them across the one-hundred-thousand or so words I write, as I carefully observe them, record their actions and reactions, I am changing myself. My hope is that I am skilled enough to render them accurately, such that the spirit of adventure is a shared one – recognised in the hearts and imaginations of readers.  

I asked my writer-friends how their characters came to them. They spoke of their characters becoming great friends, of feeling shy of them at first, of falling in love with them. They even spoke of writing them as a form of magical possession; of being inhabited by a spirit who wishes to be known, sketched and seen. I love that idea. 

Aren’t the best books, the ones that stay with us, comprised of characters who we recognise in some way? There's a relatability to them, their humanity playing out in ways that make it easier to identify ourselves in all our perfection and limitations. It was always a book that enabled me to put words to a particular feeling or emotion. Penny-drop moments of concentrated complexity can be delivered in a sentence or two, like a light going on: “Oh, that’s it!”  

My final theory, therefore, is that it’s only books that can deliver this straight-to-the-point, I-get-it feeling. Paintings can move, sculpture can awe, music can inspire, films can amuse. But the written story is the sharpest, truest, longest-lived art form.  

Why? Because stories feature people in close-up, specific focus (no matter what narrative/psychic distance the author wields) and, being constructed of words on a page, they require complex focus and brainwork to read. Imagination takes effort, or sustained cognitive engagement, as the men in white coats might say. For this reason alone, it behoves us writers to come up with the most compelling, intriguing, daring (in all forms of courageous thought and action) characters we can muster – as a gift to both our own growth, but also to our readers. And where else better to go so wholly into the practical aspects of your story and your characters than right here on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme?  

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

Last week, we looked at a couple of solo flights – characters brought to life only from their dialogue or only from their interior reflection.

But that’s not mostly how stories go. Mostly, we have a point of view character through whom we meet others. So what we get is character-through-character. The reader interprets the third party character from what the point-of-view character is reporting – but that interpretation always takes into account who’s telling the story.

That all sounds slightly academic, but it’s not really – it’s normal human. Suppose I find there is chocolate cake mess all over my kitchen, and some story about a dog jumping up and scoffing it. Well, fine – but my understanding of what’s happened will depend rather a lot on whether my wife is telling the story … or a very chocolatey 6-year-old.

So here’s a chunk of action – narrated by dear old Fiona – in which she interacts with a woman named Anna Quintrell.

The scene is set in a two-custody cell in a modern custody suite. Quintrell is an accountant who’d been busted for something bad. Fiona has been working undercover, but Quintrell doesn’t know that and still thinks Fiona was part of her gang. Fiona has a visible face injury which she acquired on purpose – she wanted to look the part. She’s asked that the custody cell be made as cold as possible.

Here’s the scene, a complete (but very short) chapter:

Quintrell is brought to the cell when the light is dying.

She looks rough. Not injured and knocked about, like me, but exhausted. Defeated. She’s still in her cutesy little summer dress, but someone has given her a grey fleece to wear over the top.

We stare at each other.

She sits on her bed. There are four blankets in the room and I’ve got them all.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Resisting arrest,’ I say. ‘Except some of it happened after arrest.’

She draws her legs up on the bed. ‘Can I have my blankets?’

I give her one.

‘And another?’

I tell her to fuck off. Say I’m cold.

‘So am I.’

I shrug. Not interested.

There’s a pause. A pause sealed off by steel doors and concrete walls.

‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

I shrug.

Light dies in the ceiling.

She tries to make herself comfortable. Twitches the fleece and blanket, trying to get warm. A losing game.

There’s a call button by the door which allows prisoners to ask for help from staff. She presses it, asks for more bedclothes. Someone laughs at her and tells her to go to sleep.

She stands by my bed and says plaintively. ‘You’ve got my blanket.’

I tell her again to fuck off. She’s bigger than me, but I’m scarier. She goes back to her bed.

The light fades some more. I try to sleep. The aspirin has worn off and my head hurts. Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered. Down the corridor, we can hear more suspects being brought in and processed. Doors slam through the night: church bells calling the hour.

I sleep.

And that’s it. The scene is so simple that, in a way, there’s not much to say about it.

The central element here is the establishment of a power hierarchy. When they were both in the criminal gang, Quintrell was Fiona’s boss. She was taller, richer, more educated (she thought), more powerful. In here, though, that’s all inverted.

A cutsie summer dress is replaced by a grey fleece. The resources people fight over aren’t elegant homes (a contest where Quintrell won, but prison-issue blankets (a contest where Fiona wins 3-1.)

There are only two scraps of non-blanket related dialogue. The first is the bit about Fiona’s injury.

She tells Quintrell she was hurt once ‘resisting arrest’ – that is, she claims she fought the police who tried to arrest her. And part of the injury was after arrest, meaning that she was beaten up during interrogation. That’s not true – Fiona and the reader know it’s not true – but

1. It makes Quintrell even more scared about her situation and
2. It makes Fiona look even scarier to Quintrell, because she gets beaten up by cops and doesn’t even seem that perturbed by it.

The other non-blanket related moment is Quintrell saying, ‘They bugged my house. My phone. They’ve got everything.’

That’s Quintrell looking at total defeat – a prison sentence stretching ahead of her. But it’s also a frightened woman reaching out to someone who might be a friend. It’s a request for sympathy.

That request gets yet another shrug. So far Quintrell has received from Fiona:

1. A stare
2. A blanket
3. A ‘fuck off’
4. Two shrugs.

That’s not really much of a basis for friendship, so Quintrell who is imprisoned and cold and facing jail is now also friendless.

Nothing at all has happened in this scene, except that: ‘Quintrell starts crying. Quiet sobs, that tumble into the blanket and are smothered.’

 That moment of crying is the bit Fiona has been working to achieve. In the morning, when they wake, Fiona shows a tiny bit of openness to friendship. Here’s a tiny snippet from the chapter that follows:

Quintrell trusts my legend [=undercover identity] completely now. Perhaps she did before, I don’t know, but my injuries and my presence here have washed away any last trace of suspicion.

I cover up with blankets again. Then relent and throw one over to Quintrell.

‘Thanks.’

She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and arranges it over her front. She looks like a disaster relief victim, or would do if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses with matching loafers.

‘I like your dress.’

‘Thanks.’

Silence fills the cell.

Fiona gives Quintrell a blanket and says something nice about her dress. That’s the nudge that Quintrell needs to turn all confessional. She starts spilling her heart out to Fiona … unaware that the whole thing is being recorded. She ends up incriminating herself and most of her fellow gang-members.

And throughout all this, we always learn more about Quintrell, but always through a Fiona-ish lens. A Jack Reacher type character might have noted the dress – roughly: “she wore a blue and white summer dress” – but wouldn’t have got involved with it.

A more feminine type character might have started to characterise the dress a bit more. (“A summer dress, but smart, almost nautical. A dress that wanted to hold a glass of cold white wine overlooking some sunny beachfront in the Hamptons.”)

Fiona is feminine enough to circle back to Quintrell’s clothes, but in a Fiona-ish way – ‘if disaster relief victims wore pretty little summer dresses …’

So every time we learn something about Quintrell, we also learn something about Fiona. And in fact, because Fiona’s undercover, we understand Fiona herself at two levels: the Fiona she’s pretending to be, and the Fiona she really is.

Last week, I said that our two masters of fiction worked via (i) putting some real unpredictability into their characters and (ii) letting us, the reader, figure out what’s going on.

The scene we’ve looked at today involves two people not one, so the focus is always shared.

But the same basic rule applies.

Keep the scene unpredictable. Here, the scene gets its tension in part because we know that Fiona isn’t actually a horrible cow. She’s someone who normally would share her blankets or comfort a woman in distress. So we keep sort of expecting her to do just that. But she doesn’t. She keeps the blankets and tells woman-in-distress to fuck off.

Fiona’s a joy to write in part because she brings her own built-in unpredictability. You have to pay close attention to the scene, because (this is Fiona) you just aren’t sure what’ happening next.

And: don’t explain.

There’s basically no explanation for the reader at all in the parts I’ve just quoted. A little further on, though, we get this:

I say, ‘Anna, how did you get into all this? Why did you get started?’

And she tells me.

Almost without further prompting. Without thought for where she is or who could be listening. It’s a beautiful illustration of the interrogator’s oldest maxim: that people want to confess. An urge as deep as breathing. The beautiful relief of sharing secrets.

That last paragraph is the first time that Fiona explains anything to the reader. But (and I think this is a pretty good rule in fiction) that the explanation is only given, once the reader already (kind of) knows it. (If you’re explaining how custody suites work or rules around covert recording, that’s different. I’m talking here about character/emotional type explanations.)

In effect, what Fiona is doing here is simply voicing something that the reader has already figured out.

So the reader brain is doing something like this: “Wow, Fiona is being a real cow. And blimey, Quintrell looks defeated. Oh, she’s crying now. And what’s this? Fiona’s being a little bit nice this morning. Bet Quintrell needs that. And – aha! – Fiona’s now basically inviting Quintrell to confess to everything. She really shouldn’t do that, but I can see she’s absolutely going to.”

All that Fiona is doing with her ‘urge to confess’ paragraph is wrapping that already-existing understanding up into a nice little package, so the reader-brain can dock that bit of knowledge and move on.

Always with these emails, I learn what I think by writing the email.

So, honestly, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to find today, but I think this last lesson is the big one. It’s OK to explain something character-related to the reader … but you need to only do that once the reader already basically knows. You’re drawing a line under something so you can move on, but the reader needs to have done the work for themselves first.

Here endeth the lesson.

And if you find yourself in a cell with Fiona, then keep your mouth shut – and your blankets close.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Explanations

Interesting one today. I want you to find a place in your text where you explain something about character X. Does the reader already kind of know what you’re saying, or not? Why is the explanation here. Find a 300 word chunk and tell us your thoughts.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry

Crime readers are a discerning bunch and if you asked a hundred what draws them to the genre, I’d put money on the words “pace” and “tension” topping most lists. You can have a beautifully constructed plot with an exquisitely satisfying ending – but unless you keep the reader promising themselves just one more chapter, your efforts will be wasted. 

Pacy, gripping crime fiction is hard to sustain over 80k plus words. It’s both exhausting and cruel to the reader to try to achieve it by writing fight after car chase after clifftop shootout. Plot and action can’t do all the lifting, so here are three lower-octane aspects of writing that will keep the screws turning… 

Character 

In the words of acclaimed US author Dennis Lehane, ‘You create a bunch of characters and let them bounce into one another. That’s how a good story happens.’  

But how? First, set your protagonist and antagonists up so the reader will care about (not necessarily like) them.  

• What kind of person are they?  

• What do they want most in life?  

• What would they kill / die for?  

• What are their secrets?  

• How do they justify their behaviour to themselves and others? 

• Why are they and their opponents such adversaries?  

• Why does the fight / journey / case mean so much to them?  

• What are their redeeming / damning features? 

Now, use every opportunity to set up conflict between them. That doesn’t mean them brawling every time they meet – but keep ratcheting up the stakes. Make your antagonist dump impossible jeopardy on your protagonist time and again, culminating in the mother of all showdowns. 

Your cast will not only carry the story, they are the story. It’s not the events themselves that matter, but the impact each has on your main characters: both in the moment, and as their arcs, and that of your story, progress. 

Setting 

You don’t even need people to up the ante. One of the most beautiful crime novels I’ve read this year is All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.  

In this scene, Saint, a young girl, ventures into the wilderness in a last-ditched effort to rescue her kidnapped friend, Patch. Without once mentioning how she feels, Whitaker lets the setting do all the work:  

She checked her map a dozen times before she found a hard yellow sign. CAUTION MINIMUM MAINTENANCE ROAD LEVEL B SERVICE ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.…A tractor sprayed with mud, its scoop left buried in the dirt. The track fed the mouth of woodland so dense she slowed as possum haw leaves slid to a gulley… Saint splashed through a stream crossing, her sneakers soon filled with the brace of cold. … above ravens watched her like prey. At the first fall of rain she looked through a canopy that stammered light as wind parted it.  

For me this is the gold standard of conjuring terror through setting. Vivid descriptions peppered with metaphors of abandonment – ‘the scoop left buried in the dirt’ – and fear – ‘her sneaker filled with the brace of cold’. These are images to die for, in my humble crime writing opinion. 

Take how Stevenson, in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, through the rise then fall of the fog, evokes incredible eeriness as Mr Utterson travels to find Hyde, wanted for murder: 

The fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling. 

Dialogue 

We all know to ‘show, not tell’ where appropriate, and dialogue is one of the strongest ways of vividly moving a plot on. Without info dumping, by using character traits and speech patterns you can build tension, create conflict and even craft legendary scenes (remember the ‘You can’t handle the truth’ courtroom exchange in A Few Good Men?)  

Some great tips for dramatic dialogue are to: 

• Create and sustain subtext through unspoken thoughts and memorable lines 

• Build conflict, remembering less is more so avoid melodrama 

• Avoid niceties and fillers; make every line count 

• Reveal something new, however small, in each passage 

• Use action to underline meaning and drama 

• End on a dramatic high. 

The key to great dialogue is authenticity and differentiation. If you can hear your characters’ distinct voices, as if they’re people actually speaking and sparking off one another, you have the makings of a thrilling scene with escalating tension that races the story along. 

Throughout the Jericho Writers’ Crime and Thriller Course, we study all these techniques. It’s fascinating how the students adapt to applying the principles and examples we focus on, and how dramatic their stories become as a result.  

Try them for yourself and see how they work for you. 

The internet is practically bursting with content on the writing routines of best-selling authors. But these writers already make a living from the craft. Their schedules often feel completely different from those of aspiring debut authors, who might be juggling a day job and caring for dependents while trying to find any spare moment to write. So, is a writing routine necessary – and if so, how can it be tailored to suit you? 

A novel (or non-fiction book) for adults is roughly 80,000 words long. To complete a draft in a year, you'd need to achieve an output of 6,650 words a month (or 1,500 words a week). Viewed like this, the task doesn’t seem insurmountable. And there’s nobody saying you have to finish that first draft in twelve months, either. This is where establishing a writing routine comes in. 

Below, I’ve looked at the writing routines of some of my aspiring debut clients, alongside those of well-known authors: 

Fawzia (aspiring debut): “I have three hours a week to write. That’s it. I’m a mum to two young children and I tell myself I’ll write in the evenings, but I’m too fried. My three-hour stint (when the kids are in childcare) is gold dust. Although it doesn’t amount to a huge word-count, it’s all I’ve got. Without that time, I’d go mad!” 

The famous author: Haruki Murakami rises early, and runs and swims at intervals to break up his desk time. In his words, “Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”  

Claudia (aspiring debut): “My kids are at school full-time. I teach part time, so I manage to dedicate one day a week to writing. I start as soon as the house is empty and leave everything, including housework and lesson planning, until after the kids are home. I’m not a slave to wordcount because I can’t be. I just have to ringfence this time, and use it as best I can.” 

The famous author: Jodi Picoult starts her narratives already knowing the conclusion, then works backwards to find out how to get there. Jodi’s approach to writing is that it’s a ‘proper’ job and requires an 8-hour day.   

Andreas (aspiring debut): “I live alone. I’m lucky to be able to write during the day, and schedule my paid work in the evenings. I’ve so far turned out an impressive word-count on a weekly basis, but often it’s sketchy and gets deleted and rewritten. But so long as I’m writing, I’m trying my best, even if it’s a long-term work-in-progress.” 

The famous author: Kate Mosse explains, “For me, the writing comes at the very end of the preparation and planning, which might take four or five years. When I write, I start very early in the day – maybe 4 o’clock – with a cup of strong, sweet black coffee and my tiny laptop… I then write for, say, seven/eight hours a day, before disappearing off for a walk or a swim or anything that keeps the old bones moving. After that, a quiet evening with the family… ready to begin again the next morning.” 

Padraig (aspiring debut): “Now the kids have grown and flown, I reserve Saturdays for writing. I guard my Saturdays jealously (it’s become a bit of a family joke). I don’t care how slowly I write, so long as I can keep working on my book that sacred one day a week.” 

The famous author: David Mitchell notes, “I could probably write for ten hours a day if I had them, but I’ve got two young children, so I can either be a halfway decent dad or I can be a writer who writes all day. I can’t really be both. As things stand, I might clock in three hours on a poor day, and six or seven on a productive day. Sometimes… I forget the time until my long-suffering wife begins to drop noisy hints.”  

The final words must go to Kate Mosse, because her writing routine advice fits any lifestyle or circumstance: “Five minutes a day are better than no minutes. You might not yet have time to write that ‘big’ novel you’ve been planning, but everyone – whatever their responsibilities for working, caring, life – can find five minutes a day. Keep a pad and paper by the kettle… or send text messages to yourself. Look at people in the street and think of how you’d put them on the page with just three words… when you do have time to write, you’ll be match fit and ready to go.” 

Four Tips for Establishing Your Writing Routine: 

• Decide when (and how long) you can write for each week 

• Set a ‘time-aside’ goal, or a wordcount goal – and be realistic!  

• Be kind to yourself – sometimes life gets in the way 

• Give yourself time off, too.  

You know how gifted artists can suggest a face – and a mood, a character, a personality – in just a few swift lines?

Well, writers can do the same. So today’s email is just a “stand and admire” type affair. Two writers. Two vastly different techniques. But some surprising commonalities in the way they work…

Dialogue with Big El

How about this from Elmore Leonard:

'Man, all the photographers, TV cameras. This shit is big news, has everybody over here to see it. Otherwise, Sunday, what you have mostly are rich ladies come out with their little doggies to make wee-wee. I mean the doggies, not the ladies.' A girl in front of them smiled over her shoulder and Ordell said, 'How you doing, baby? You making it all right?' He looked past her now, glanced at Louis to say, 'I think I see him,' and pushed through the crowd to get closer to the street. 'Yeah, there he is. Black shirt and tie? A grown-up skinhead Nazi. I call him Big Guy. He likes that.'

'It's Richard,' Louis said. 'Jesus.'

The speaker is a guy called Ordell. This is the second page of Rum Punch, so the reader has no prior knowledge of the character. But that little paragraph? It says so much. It says:

1. He talks a kind of cool, urban tough guy English – which is just about right. He’s a ruthless blackmarket operator in LA.
2. At the same time, “with their little doggies to make wee-wee”? Huh? What? This is such an unexpected turn of phrase, we don’t quite know what to do with it. I think, for me, this is sign of a kind of unpredictability. If the guy was angry with you and happened to have a gun in his hand, you’d have no idea which way he was about to leap.
3. And sure enough, it’s straight from that highly unexpected phrase to a very standard pick-up type line (“How you doing, baby?”). From a white power march to doggies making wee to a very basic pick-up line. Our heads are spinning.
4. And then, we get to the point of the scene: “There he is. Black shirt and tie. A grown-up skinhead Nazi.” And oh, OK, we readjust again. Forget the pretty girls. Forget the doggie wee-wees. We’re hunting Nazis. And Nazis are bad, right? No one loves a Nazi. Plus, we assume correctly that Ordell is Black, and so he surely really really doesn’t like Nazis.
5. Only then, yet another switcheroo: “I call him Big Guy. He likes that.” And again: huh? Why are we making nice with skinhead Nazis? Why is Ordell, of all people doing so?

The whole paragraph is barely 100 words, but it’s told us so much already about Ordell – and already locked us into the story, because we know that anything involving Ordell and Nazi Big Guy is going to involve violence and a lot of unpredictability and fireworks.

Big El’s tips for humans:

1. Throw unpredictability into your dialogue. Steer one way, then abruptly somewhere different.
2. Let the dialogue do character description for you. Leonard doesn’t need to tell us that Ordell is highly sexed and ready to try it on with pretty much anyone. He just writes 9 words of dialogue and leaves us to figure it out.

Interior Monologue, with Mrs Robinson

Here is a completely opposite technique from Marilynne Robinson – a technique so opposite, that Elmore Leonard would never use it:

I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little.

No dialogue here. It’s all interior reflection. And John Ames, the narrator here, is about as far from Ordell as you could possibly imagine.

But we have the same themes at play here:

1. Real unpredictability. Here, the narrator surprises us by telling us that people are asking him (a person who’s alive) what it’s like to be dead. Then he surprises us further, by telling us that elderly people would ask him that even when he was young. Then he comes up with what is maybe a somewhat expected line about going home… but then thwarts that by saying we have no home in the world… before going on to talk about what might actually be the homiest thing in the world, namely a fried egg sandwich and coffee and radio.
2. Let the interior monologue do the character work for you. In just the same way as regular dialogue for Elmore Leonard, Marilynne Robinson doesn’t bother to tell us much about her character. She just lets him narrate and forces the reader to draw inferences.

I was originally going to pick a third novelist to compare as well, but I’m intrigued enough by the basis similarity in approach here – unpredictability plus a lot of reliance on the reader figuring things out for themselves – that I wanted to see how I approach the same  issues.

And – well, it’s complicated. I write first person as Fiona and, yes, Fiona is notably unnpredictable right from her actions through to her word choices. She doesn’t explain herself much. She just is, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. So in terms of my approach with Fiona, I guess I operate on largely the same lines as the two models here.

But when it comes to Fiona encountering other characters, something a bit more complicated is going on. We’ll look at that next week.

In the meantime, it’s time for…

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Give me any chunk (100-200 words max; we want short) that shows deep characterisation in a few swift lines. Look for unpredictability and a reliance on the reader’s own intelligence. It’s going to be interesting to see what you come up with.

When you're ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry

We all know about Chekhov’s gun. The playwright wrote to a young dramatist saying: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.”

And quite right too. Bang, bang, do svidanya, tovarishch, and all that.

But? Oh hang it:

• He was Russian, and Russians drink black tea with jam, and how far can you trust anyone who does that?
• He was a dramatist and we write novels, and those two things are obviously related but they’re also obviously not the same.
• He was clearly rather prone to giving that advice, since he’s recorded as giving it at least three times, and at a certain point, you do wonder if he wasn’t simply enjoying the aphorism as much as truly believing it.

The biggest difference between the novel and the play is simply that of length.

Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard runs to about 18,000 words. Macbeth runs to 17,000. King Lear, 26,000.

Now, I don’t know about you, but my character’s barely pulled on her jeans and pistol-whipped her first victim by that point in a book. She’s barely done brushing her teeth. If your chosen art form is (by our lofty standards) rather short, then damn right you can’t fool around with guns that don’t fire.

Novels, I think, can be messier. They are built to resemble life, and life is messy, so I don’t really see why novels can’t be messy.

Now there are strict limits here, of course. Your plot needs to be plotty. Your resolution needs to feel like it’s summarising and concluding some important thing that has occupied the reader for the past 350 pages.

The ragged edge

But a ragged edge? Some questions answered only with a shrug? For me, that’s fine. Here’s an example from one of my books. The question is how Parry (a kidnapper) ended teaming up with a bunch of monks. Here’s all I say about it:

Parry’s living in this valley. Maybe starts going to one or two services in the monastery just for the hell of it. Or because he had a guilty conscience. Or to build himself some cover. Who knows? Anyway, he gets serious. He finds God—or his own crazy and violent version of God—and he decides to make some changes in the way he operates …

And Parry’s new buddies, these monks, are more than a bit crazy themselves. They have this big silence and reflection and abstinence thing going. They have a deep sense that people who grew up with God in their lives have become deaf to His word …

Now, quite honestly that’s more of a hand-wave than an actual answer. Structurally speaking, what I say here is “Maybe … or … or … who knows? Anyway …”

For me, that’s fine. Even in a crime novel whose purpose is to solve mystery, that kind of thing is fine.

Here’s another example, at the end of another novel:

‘All a bit messy and last minute, but anything to get the job done.’

‘Yes, exactly. If we work hard enough, I expect we’ll find a link between Devine and Wormold. At any rate, I’m pretty sure that Devine gave the order.’

Jackson thinks about that. Gathers more daisies. We’re motoring now. Him gathering, me stitching them.

What we have here is a slightly disengaged conversation about how Bad Guy A ended up conspiring with Bad Guy B, but in the end, the business of making a supermassive daisy-chain seems more important and that thread is never picked up again.

I think so long as the text somehow acknowledges that yes, some questions remain unanswered, it doesn’t really matter that they exist. And, me – I prefer it. It feels more authentic, makes the world more real.

The long game

And at that same time, I also love the ridiculously delayed punchline – a way of tying things up neatly, but 10s of 1000s of words later than the reader might expect.

So in one of my books (chapter 29) this bit of dialogue takes place:

‘Twll dîn pob Sais,’ I say.

‘Pardon?’

‘Doesn’t matter. The address of the cottage, please.’

That phrase in Welsh isn’t explained. The matter is just left. In Chekhovian terms, that gun may be unimportant, but it feels very not-fired.

Except that, a full twenty chapters, later, we get this:

[In deepest Glasgow,] Two kids pass my car. One of them raps on my window. I wind my window down and say, ‘Yes?’ The kid says something in an accent so thick I don’t understand it. I reply in Welsh, the same thing as I said to Sophie Hinton.Twll dîn pob Sais. Every Englishman an arsehole. He goes off muttering. He might as well be speaking Icelandic.

That’s the punchline. We didn’t understand what Fiona said to pretty Sophie Hinton at the time, but now we do, and the delay is entertaining. It’s like the author was remembering that twenty chapters back, the reader felt a little moment of discomfort – tiny, but nevertheless a little negative prick – and, ta-daa, the author, smiling says, I hadn’t forgotten you. Surprise! Here’s your little gift. In the process, we understand something more about the Fiona / Hinton relationship. The whole thing feels more delightful because of the absurdly long pause.

Or here’s another example. Fiona is talking to the abbot of a small monastery in Wales:

‘You’ll recognise our patron, of course?’

It takes me a second, but I realise he’s talking about St David, a Welsh bishop of the sixth century and the patron saint of Wales.

‘David,’ I say. ‘A local boy.’

‘Local enough. He was preaching at the Synod of Brefi to a large crowd. Because those at the back couldn’t hear him, a small hill rose up beneath him. The dove here settled on his shoulder.’

‘That’s his big miracle?’ I ask. ‘Making a hill? In Wales?’

It’s hard to think of a more superfluous achievement.

That moment is complete in itself. No little prick of disappointment for the reader. But then, ten chapters on, we get this:

I chide him. ‘You’re thinking modern again, Inspector. You need to think medieval.’ That doesn’t illuminate things for some reason. So I explain, ‘This is the monastery of St David. He’s their patron saint. Now David’s big thing, his signature miracle if you want to put it like that, was raising a hill at Llandewi Brefi—’

‘A hill? In Llandewi? Why would anyone—?’

‘I know, don’t ask. But …’

And what this does is to bring the reader onto the inside of the joke. It’s like we and the reader are old buddies, with a shared set of jokes and references. When Inspector Burnett stumbles into the set-up, the reader has the delight of recognising it – “Oooh, I know this one!” We don’t even have to complete the joke properly to get that pleasure, and Fiona moves rapidly on.

One last example. In the Deepest Grave, Fiona proposes to fake an antiquity. Here she is talking with her two co-conspirators:

George stares at Katie. Stares at me. And back again.

‘Do you mean what I think you mean?’

Katie nods. ‘Exactly. Yes. She wants to make—’

I interrupt. Say, ‘Caledfwlch.’

Katie: ‘What?’

‘Caledfwlch. The damn thing is Welsh, not some fake Latin, medieval French knock-off.’

Now there’ll be some Welsh-speakers who know their ancient history and for whom that little passage is as plain as day. But the vast majority of readers, will be thinking huh? On the one hand, Fiona has just told us exactly what she intends to make. On the other, virtually no one has any idea what she means.

It’s that Chekhovian gun again, very not fired.

Only then … and again, many chapters later we get an incident at an archaeological dig in the south of England. The researchers have just extracted a remarkably ancient sword from a burial pit, when armed robbers swoop in, and steal it. Here’s what happens afterwards:

[The robbers] drive off. The whole thing takes two minutes, maybe less.

For a moment, just a moment, there is perfect stillness.

A bird, a lapwing maybe, calling aloft. The burr of the motorway.

Then Tifford, Dr Simon Tifford, Senior Archaeologist and a man now very close to tears, breaks the silence.

‘They’ve stolen Excalibur,’ he wails. ‘They’ve stolen fucking Excalibur.’

And, aha!, now we know what Caledfwlch is. We solve that little moment of mystery some 75 pages earlier, but there’s laughter here too. The reader’s saying, “Ah! You even told me what the thing was, and I didn’t guess, and I probably should have done, and now you’ve got an archaeologist wandering around swearily talking about the world’s most famous-ever sword. Yep, you got me there.”

It's the length of the delay that delivers the pleasure – all the joy rests in that huge delay.

The ragged edge, the long game

So yes, I do love a ragged edge to a story. A sense of nothing ever too tidy, questions still nibbling like minnows. But I do love jokes and puzzles where the punchline takes an age to come – that gun finally fired, but long, long after it was expected.

That’s it from me. Last night, I ate stewed apricot, served very cold, with big soft pillows of whipped cream. Toasted hazelnuts on top. Oh my. Summer is lovely.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The long game

Do you have any much-delayed punchlines or reveals in your book? Things held out of sight for a long period, then released to delight? Tell me about it. I want some quotes. Let’s feast on some actual text again – it’s been too long.

Log into Townhouse and share it in this forum.

Til soon.

Harry

Whether you're halfway through a novel or haven’t written in a while, short stories can be such a refreshing way to get back into the flow. They’re quick, creative, and honestly brilliant for warming up your writing muscles—especially if you’re in need of a nudge.

Maybe you’re thinking of entering a competition, or just want to shake things up with something totally different from what you’re working on. Either way, short stories are a brilliant space to experiment— with voice, structure, characters, all of it—without the pressure of a huge project. And the best part? Writing more short stories really does make you a better writer.

If you’re looking for a spark of inspiration, we’ve put together some writing prompts to help you get started. Who knows—one of these might just turn into your next favourite piece.

Short story writing prompts

Let’s start broad. These creative writing prompts can be adapted to any genre, and they’re perfect for sparking those first few sentences when you’re staring at a blank page.

• A character finds a letter in an old book—addressed to them, but written 100 years ago.
• Someone makes the exact same wish every year on their birthday. This year, it comes true—but not in the way they imagined.
• A shop that only appears at night opens its doors to one unsuspecting visitor.
• A character decides to disappear for a day without telling their family. What happens when they return?

These short story prompts are especially handy for short story writers entering competitions—judges often look for originality, a strong hook, and a satisfying ending, all of which can grow from a well-formed idea.

Romance short story prompts

For those who love a dash of longing and connection, these romance-themed ideas are ideal:

• Two rival street performers keep trying to outdo each other at the same spot. Their acts get more elaborate... and more flirtatious.
• A character agrees to be someone's fake date for a wedding—only to realise too late it's their ex’s wedding.
• Someone receives a text from an unknown number. They start replying. It becomes the highlight of their day.
• A florist keeps receiving anonymous deliveries of rare flowers. Each one comes with a clue.

Romantic short stories are a great way to test chemistry and tension between characters in just a few pages—and who doesn’t love a heartwarming twist?

Funny short story prompts

Want to make your reader laugh (or at least raise an eyebrow)? Here are some humorous creative writing prompts to play with:

• A ridiculous item gets posted to the wrong address.
• A character joins a cult by mistake after trying to sign up for a free yoga class.
• A character joins a protest thinking it’s about climate change—turns out it’s to save a beloved local sandwich.
• A character tries a new mindfulness app, only to find it starts commenting on their life choices. Loudly. In public.

Funny short stories are a brilliant way to experiment with voice and timing, and they’re often memorable in competition entries for all the right reasons.

Fantasy short story prompts

Need something a little more magical? These short story ideas are great for fans of speculative fiction:

• A character sells spells for other people, but why won’t their own spells work for them?
• A secret guild of mapmakers redraws the world every night, but one accidentally erases their hometown. Now they have to fix it before midnight.
• A witch gives a character the ability to read minds for one day only.
• A character decides to bottle and sell dreams. One buyer wants a refund.

Fantasy is where short stories get to play big. You don’t need a thousand pages to whisk a reader off to a world with dragon-crawling forests, talking crows, or secret societies in the sea. In just a few scenes, you can explore magic, power, good vs evil—or just what happens when someone opens the wrong door. Its imagination turned up at the highest volume, and the best part? You make the rules. Then you break them.

Scary short story prompts

Ready to chill your readers’ bones? Try these scary short story prompts for a darker twist:

• A character moves into a new house and finds the exact same furniture they left in their old one—right down to the scratches.
• Every time someone looks in the mirror, the reflection smiles just a second too late.
• A voice on the baby monitor starts giving warnings.
• A child draws the same faceless figure every day, saying it visits them at night.

Short horror stories are brilliant for bumping up tension and mood—and they make deliciously scary entries for seasonal contests (hello, Halloween looking at you) or eerie little anthologies.

Psychological thriller prompts

What happens when your character can’t trust what they see—or themselves? Try these psychological thriller prompts and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes:

• A man wakes up every day to a voice recording he doesn’t remember making. Each day, the message gets more disturbing.
• Someone starts to suspect they’re being followed. But when they finally confront the stalker, the person insists they’re the one being followed.
• A therapist realises all of their clients are dreaming about the same person—but none of them know each other.
• A woman’s new housemate is perfect. Too perfect. And she’s starting to mirror the woman’s habits… exactly.

Short stories are a perfect match for psychological thrillers—tense, twisty, and packed with just enough uncertainty to leave readers checking over their shoulders. These stories thrive on doubt, shifting perspectives, and the slow unravelling of what we think we know. Whether it’s obsession, memory, or a truth hiding in plain sight, it’s all about playing with the mind.

Historical fiction prompts

What might your characters uncover—or risk—when the past refuses to stay buried? Try these historical fiction prompts to dig into secrets, scandals, and moments that still echo through time:

• During WWII, a woman running a bookshop starts slipping coded messages between the pages for the resistance.
• A photographer in the 1920s captures something shocking on film—and must decide whether to share it.
• In 1950s Soho, a jazz singer becomes the target of surveillance after befriending someone with political ties.
• A lighthouse keeper in the 1800s battles loneliness and the strange lights that appear offshore every foggy night.

Short stories are a brilliant way to zoom in on a single moment, a hidden voice, or a tiny rebellion that never made it into the textbooks. All you need is a sliver of time, a strong sense of place, and someone with something to lose.

Take a break, try a prompt

Whether you're deep into your novel or juggling a few too many writing plates, stepping away to write a short story can feel like a creative exhale. Prompts are brilliant for breaking through blocks, playing with new characters, or sparking an idea that surprises you and takes on a life of its own!

And who knows—your next short story might just turn into something bigger than you expected.

Want more inspiration?

Check out these other blogs on short story writing...

Short Story Structure: The Art of Writing a Great Short Story

How To Write A Short Story In 10 Steps

10 Great Examples of How to Begin a Short Story

That’s right: eight months. Less than a year.  

If you’re like I once was – that is, if you’ve spent years thinking about writing a novel but rarely putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard – this timeframe might sound mad. But, as I discovered when I finally gave writing a proper go, showing up to your manuscript consistently can yield far quicker results than you might think.  

Now, having published four books, I’d say a good quality draft (90,000 words or so) takes me around six months to pull together. So, what took me from dreaming about writing to actually doing it? I didn’t undergo an overnight personality transplant or discover a magical wellspring of motivation. (Unfortunate, as that would still be super useful). In fact, I did that most cliched yet crucial of things. I gave myself permission to try.  

As if to signal to myself that having a bash at writing a book was 100% allowed, I signed up for a creative writing course. Ultimately, this made all the difference to my craft, discipline and self-belief – but in the short-term, following a structured programme felt far more comfortable than simply winging it in the hope I’d one day reach ‘the end’.  

If you think you’d benefit from a similar experience, our eight-month Novel Writing Course might be exactly what you need. It’s designed for writers who have great ideas but feel they’re flying blind when it comes to plot-planning, character development, worldbuilding and so on. 

Not ready to commit to a course? With a little planning, plus positivity and persistence, you can still get your book written (or at least well underway) in less than a year.  

Feeling fired up? Here’s what to do next… 

Eight steps to writing your novel in eight months

1. Plan your story upfront

George RR Martin could have written about the bitter divide between House Planner and House Pantser. For the uninitiated, the debate comes down to the difference between people who simply must have an outline before they begin drafting and those with the brass neck to sit down at a blank screen and just… see what happens.  

I joke, of course: there’s no real argument. We writers are a peaceful people, and most accept there’s no right or wrong way to work. Personally, though, I need a proper plan before I get going – and if your ambition is to write a book within eight months, I don’t think risking ‘dead time’ (where you produce thousands of words that may serve no clear purpose) makes much sense.  

If you’re a Premium Member, you can access our Build Your Book Month content for free. This includes a very helpful plot-planning spreadsheet and a bunch of fantastic video lessons on the three-act story structure. (Not a PM? You can buy the content as a standalone course for £99, or join us to get this, plus plenty more writing resources).  

Alternatively, you might want to consider the Save The Cat approach, the five-act story structure or the snowflake method, all of which will allow you to create an overall ‘shape’ for your story before you start writing. However you choose to plan, doing so will effectively stress-test your novel idea, helping you work out whether it will extend into a narrative that’s tens of thousands of words long.  

On the Novel Writing Course, students spend their first month focused on planning their novels, and I’d suggest devoting a similar chunk of time – weeks, rather than days – to interrogating your story arc independently. Imagine the events, twists and turns you’ll include in your plot and work out how they’ll affect the journey your characters go on. Rushing through this stage tends to be a false economy: fail to answer key questions now, and they’ll come back to bite you later.  

2. Consider your novel's characters, point of view and setting

Who are you writing about? What problems do they have, and how does your protagonist – or their situation – need to change in order for your story to be satisfying? Remember, a novel isn’t really about what happens: it’s about how what happens affects characters readers care about.  

Are you going to write in first person, third person, past or present tense? (You might have to experiment a bit with points of view in order to find out what’s most effective.)  

Where will the action of your story take place? Is there research you need to do, or worldbuilding you need to undertake, before you can start drafting in earnest?  

These questions need consideration both before you begin writing, but also as your story unfolds. Again, the Novel Writing Course offers tutorials and one-to-one support with all this. Meanwhile, if you’re a Premium Member, you’ll find there are multiple masterclasses available to help you.

3. Develop a novel writing routine

If you want to draft a novel in eight months, you’ll need to commit to writing regularly. Establishing a routine you can stick to (at least most of the time) is key, so ask yourself: when do you work best? How many hours per day, or per week, do you think you can spend on your manuscript?  

You might want to think in terms of word count milestones, rather than time spent at your desk – though this can be demotivating on days when the sentences won’t flow! That said, you’ll definitely need to set an overall wordcount goal that makes sense for the genre you’re writing in. If your book is commercial fiction, for example, you shouldn’t be aiming to write a 1000-page tome.  

You might want to put together a novel writing timeline that takes your final goal, plus any holidays or days off writing you’re going to need, into account. This will ensure you stay on track, but also that you keep your workload realistic. 

Whichever way you do it, create a plan that will make showing up to your work-in-progress something that feels natural: automatic. Being enrolled on a course did this job for me. I didn’t want to be the classmate who hadn’t done her homework, so I made sure to show up with fresh words every time I was supposed to! 

Finally, why not incentivise yourself a little? If you’re planning to write first thing in the morning, pair your early start with an extra-swish coffee. Alternatively, if your book work needs to wait until after the kids are in bed, make settling down with it feel like a treat: grab a cuppa, light a candle and settle in.  

4. Don't be afraid to deviate...

Having a plot plan shouldn’t stifle your creativity. See it as a roadmap for your adventure in story-telling – not a tunnel that offers only one way through.  

It’s not unusual for events to play out slightly differently on the page than they did in your head, or for a minor character’s voice to end up louder than you’d anticipated. Exploring opportunities when they arise – indulging these moments of inspiration – is where much of the true joy of writing is found.  

So, allow for deviations on the road to finishing your story – so long as they don’t take you to a completely random destination! 

5. Push perfectionism aside

If you’re writing to a deadline, you can’t afford to edit every single sentence as you go.  

Resist the urge to perfect each paragraph you produce in favour of pushing forward with your plot. If you must, highlight chunks of text you’re not convinced about so you don’t forget to examine them later – but focus on finishing your book before you worry about making every word beautiful.  

6. Write with authenticity

‘Sticky patches’ in writing often occur because getting the words out feels like pulling teeth. In those moments, I ask myself: am I trying to write something that doesn’t feel true, or in a style that’s not natural to me? 

Finding your own voice is a process, and it’s something we cover in detail on the Novel Writing Course.  

If you’re feeling blocked, try stepping back. Approach the plot point or scene you’re working on afresh. Write it honestly, with no spin – in the way you might if your only aim was entertaining a good friend. See what happens.  

7. Think about sharing your story

Different people choose to use buddies or beta readers at different stages of their writing journey – but constructive criticism can be helpful during, as well as after, drafting.  

As I worked on my first book, I found my friends’ and mentor’s feedback helped me avoid making mistakes that might have tripped me up – but their encouragement also kept me going when writing felt too hard and I lost confidence in myself.  

One of the best things about the Novel Writing Course is the incredible level of one-to-one support every student gets from their personal tutor: more individual guidance than is offered on any alternative out there.  

8. Power through your novel - then pause

The difference between people who write whole novels and those who don’t is almost always that the first group simply refused to give up. There are plenty of talented writers out there who’ll never complete a full manuscript – not because they lack the ability, but because they aren’t tenacious enough.  

With a plan and a writing routine in place, your job is actually pretty simple: keep showing up.  

If you do, in eight months (or within a realistic timeframe that works for you), you’ll have a full draft – a truly incredible achievement.  

When you get there, have a rest. Give yourself a little distance from your draft before diving back in to edit it.  

If they feel ready, students on our Novel Writing Course have the option to upgrade to the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme after spending eight months on their drafts. This involves extra tutoring on self-editing, the different routes into publishing and how to get a literary agent. For Premium Members, there’s Debi Alper’s fantastic Introduction to Self-Editing Your Novel course: the perfect, self-guided route into refining your own work.  

Whatever kind of support you seek with your writing – whether it’s through a course, Premium Membership or engagement with our Townhouse community – I wish you all the best with getting your novel written.  

You really can do it – and in eight months, too!

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of blogs on what it’s really like to be a student on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

Month three focuses in on the topic of Setting. So, place and time, essentially. We’re talking descriptions of the immediate environment, descriptions of fashion, technology and social norms relevant to the point(s) in time when the story unfolds. It means descriptions of weather too, of the creatures, plants and other people who inhabit the same environment. But the most enjoyable aspect of Setting is the symbolism it enables. This feels really important. Delivering layers of symbolism feels like constructing a secret language between the reader and I. Huge fun. 

My stories are limited only by the stretch of my imagination. My characters can be put anywhere in space and time within the known universe, and if I was writing fantasy or science-fiction, even beyond these. So, it stands to reason that, out of the infinite possibilities, the setting I plump for must have significance. I chose it – I must have reasons. Why select it, otherwise? That’s true of the macro decisions on setting, and the micro. Why 2001 as the time-setting for the story? Why July? Why 6 o'clock in the evening? Why that rainbow in the sky? Why that country and county? Why that town? Why that café? Why that seat?  

This is how I get to perform magic. Via linguistic sleight of hand, the setting can make things apparent in flashy or subtle moments as the story requires. I can lay down a new and unexpected symbolism, with a ‘Did you see that?’ ambition for how the reader will experience it. Obviously (because I am writing books, not performing card-tricks in front of a live-audience) I have to hope the symbolism works in the way I intend – like seeds intended to flower in the imagination. For me, the fun is the idea that one day someone will smile whilst making a connection to their humanity, and murmur: ‘Yes, that’s right. I get that.’ 

In the story that I’m writing while studying on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, the main setting is a Suffolk village commune in a grand manor house. The house has been both a Nunnery and Friar Monks Seminary before it was purchased by the commune. It’s inspired by a real-life commune I often go past on long dog walks. The buildings alone are fascinating. But the real reason it is the main setting for my two main characters is that I can play with its meaning - how that relates to and foreshadows the emotional arcs my characters will experience. How they both hide from certain aspects of themselves, shutting themselves off from emotions, but also their definition of what family is, relative to community, relative to society. 

My previous manuscript (currently out querying literary agents – nine rejections so far, thanks for asking) features a woman held unknowingly between life and death. So, I placed her on a Suffolk beach next to the sea-ruined wreck of her ancestral farmhouse, also inspired by real-life events. What metaphor could be better than to sit between land and sea, between life and death, between the choice to carry on or give up? A liminal setting for a liminal story. I had a lot of fun stitching in descriptions of the beach, choosing specific colloquial plant names – Dead Man’s Bells is a real plant name, for instance. I used the rhythm of waves and how they move the land, and worked in the unknowable depths and power of sea and storm. Uncontrollable forces extinguished a whole village practically overnight, so I linked that to the choices my character made – and the emotional storms which had the capacity to ruin her life.  

Is it clear how much I love wielding the craft skill of setting in my writing? I hope so. When I began writing seriously again, it was setting I began with – big, wide-angled shots of the environment my characters moved through. Long passages with all the words! Yes! As tutor Anna Vaught says, I wanted *all* the words! Creating setting is how I came back to writing. I have a theory many new writers begin in this way, describing the world of their story before considering depth of character or even plot. 

I’ve learnt to be more judicious in my deployment of setting. The Ultimate Novel Writing Programme is helping me understand how it grounds the reader, how swiftly the description of a highly-specific setting can connect the reader’s imagination to the story.  

I now know how being selective in what I highlight, using vivid nouns and active verbs, can more effectively deliver meaning, conjuring the how and what the character does and experiences more successfully in the reader’s mind. Setting was a foundational stone of my writing, and this month is definitely underpinning why I still love it so.  

Happy writing, until next time!  
 
Rachel 

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

Mostly, as you know (you know, you know), 

These emails are long (too long! too long!), 

But then again (and again and again), 

At least they’re fresh (So fresh! So fresh!) 

But this one isn’t. It’s a reprint of something I wrote five years back. I came across it at random, and I liked it, and I thought you might too. It goes – with some teeny-weeny adjustments – like as follows. 

(Well, almost. I just wanted to call your attention to the ABSURDLY low price we’ve put on our Ultimate Novel Writing Programme mentoring taster sessions. In a nutshell, for £20 you get to have a twenty-minute mentoring session with one of the tutors from the Programme. If you’re halfway interested in doing the UNWP, then this is a brilliant option for you to explain where you are in your writing journey, what you want next - and to ask any questions you may have. But the offer isn’t restricted to UNWP-ers, so if the idea of chatting with a book expert is interesting to you, then jump on it. More info here.) 

OK. Here’s the email proper...

***

Into my inbox, crept this little beauty from Cameron: 

Hi Harry,

Inspired by your own recent releases, I thought it would be a fruitful exercise to compile a list of things I wish I had known before embarking on a writing journey. 

It has been quite liberating and given me great perspective on how far I've truly come as a writer. 

But I am curious: Of the many hard-fought lessons you've learned throughout your career, could you identify one as the single most important? Or, phrased another way, which one do you wish you would have learned first? 

The short answer, of course, is that I don’t know and can’t quite engage with the question.

Most writing wisdom is born of experience and interlocks with every other piece of wisdom. So a question of characterisation is also one of plotting which is also one of theme which is also to do with sense of place, and so forth. 

So mostly I come out with some stupid line that gets me away from the question and we move onto the next thing. 

Only – 

Actually – 

It did occur to me that there is one big piece of writing wisdom that I don’t talk about as much as I ought to. It’s simply this: 

You are many writers. You aren’t just one. 

I started out writing books in the same broad vein as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer. I hope there was a little more to my books than those comparisons suggest, but they were big, old-fashioned, non-violent romps, with plenty of family drama. They were fun to write. 

My first two books were contemporary dramas, but then, for no especial reason, I turned to a historical theme. The books were still in the same broad mould, but they had an extra richness because of the early twentieth century backgrounds. 

And then –  

Well, fashions changed and sales dwindled. My publisher would have been happy for more of the same, but not at the kind of advances I wanted. So I moved on again. 

I wrote popular non-fiction. 

I wrote niche non-fiction. 

I did some ghostwriting work. One of those projects was a really lovely one which hit the hardback and paperback bestseller lists. Another one sold in plenty of territories, made me a big fat bundle of money, and was just a joy to work on. 

And then, I changed again. I came back to fiction, to crime fiction this time, and found a character and niche I loved. 

I do still love that niche, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve also had time to update some old how-to books and republish those. And I’ve turned a bundle of these emails into a whole new book. Oh yes, and I have a mad-as-a-box-of-snakes literary project on the back-burner. And I get a glitter in my eye when I think of some new non-fiction work I’d love to write. 

I’ve also been traditionally published, self-published and am half-minded to flirt with digital-first publishing via a specialist firm.

Almost none of that was in the game plan when I started out, and I’m not unusual. 

Yes, you have a few careers like John Grisham’s. His first book did OK. His second book (published in 1991) spent almost a year on the NYT bestseller list and sold a bazillion copies. After that, he’s bashed out a book a year, pretty much. His name has become almost synonymous with legal thrillers. 

And even so – Grisham has written non-legal novels. He’s written kids’ books. He’s written non-fiction. He’s written short stories. 

All those things are side dishes to the main thrust of his work – the raita to the tikka marsala – but I bet when he was writing those other things, he was fully engaged by them too. Even when you’re a hugely productive author who dominates your particular genre, it turns out you are multiple writers too. More than you ever imagined at the outset. 

So my answer to Cameron is simply: 

Be multiple. 

Find other stories, other genres, other wings. 

You can’t know yet what will work for you and what won’t. Life, it turns out, is not that interested in game plans. 

And look, I don’t know your exact position. But I do sometimes see writers working for seven years, ten years, some huge stretch of time, in order to bring one piece of work to publication. 

And sometimes that’ll be the right thing to do. But mostly it won’t. Mostly you try one thing – learn lots – see if it works – and if it doesn’t, put it down. Try a new thing. Something else in the same broad genre or something totally unrelated. 

Your passions are like a pack of monkeys. They want to skip chattering across the jungle. 

So let them. Chase them with your notebook. Catch the fruit they fling down from the trees. Watch them in the rain and in their nests at night. 

You may not be the writer you think you have to be. That a frightening thought, but it’s also a liberating one. It liberated me, not once, but repeatedly. 

My guess? My guess is, that if your writing career has any longevity, you’ll find the same is true of you too. 

***

There you go. Not quite that fresh-baked smell, that warm-from-the-oven, butter-me-now, golden-flakes-on-the-chin sort of freshness that you’re used to. But still toothsome, no?

I mean – if you had a choice between that email and being thumped with a very small ruler, or having a bad-tempered copy-editor repetitively criticise your use of semi-colons, you’d take the email every time, right? 

Me too, old buddy, me too. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Go on. Tell me. What monkeys chatter in your jungle? What book are you writing now? What others have you written or have started? What other books are in contemplation?

This isn’t quite a feedback-type exercise, I guess, except that there’s something about putting these things out into public that changes you a bit. So: put it out there - by which I mean, log into Townhouse and share it in this forum.

And that idea that you’re not yet really to mention to anyone? Tell us about that too. Let’s enlarge ourselves. Let’s multiply. 

Til soon. 

Harry 

As thrilling as it is to share what I’ve learned in my 20+ years as an editor, one of my favorite experiences as an instructor on Jericho’s Novel Writing Course and Ultimate Novel Writing Programme is watching students learn from each other. 

As the course progresses, and as they get to know and trust each other, they go from suggesting what an author could do to improve their project to what they should do to fiercely protect whatever it is that sparked a story to begin with. Over time, they begin enthusiastically coaxing one another to fan those sparks into something astonishing. 

Whether you’ve written a chapter or a complete draft of a novel, chances are, at some stage, you’re going to feel like you’ve gone as far as you can go on your own. When that moment arrives, it’s time to get some feedback. 

For some writers, it comes when they’ve been over (and over, and over…) a draft and have hit the point where it’s all trees, no forest. It’s time to get some perspective, see what’s resonating with readers, and find out what still needs improvement. Other writers find themselves at a crossroads with their project: a story could go this way or that way, and the implications of choosing either route are huge. In this scenario, an outside reader is a brainstorming partner to help them think through the options.

In either case, sharing your work with others can be a little scary. It’s a vulnerable moment, and having a plan for how to request, receive, and implement feedback can help you make the most of it.

1. Choose wisely

Many writers reach out to those closest to them—friends and family—for feedback, and while that can yield constructive criticism, don’t be surprised if you get a resounding “I love it! It’s perfect! Don’t change a thing!” from dear Aunt Bernice. While that’s lovely to hear, it’s not especially helpful. 

Cherish those champions—that note from your aunt will help you power through your umpteenth revision—but choose readers who are ready to help you improve, too. 

2. Give your readers some direction

Don’t be afraid to guide your readers about what kind of feedback you’re looking for, and avoid asking them yes or no questions. “Do you think the novel is working?” is going to yield less helpful feedback than “What can I do to improve the pacing in the last thirty pages?” 

A list of 5-10 questions can help ensure readers give you feedback you can actually use – and invite them to share anything else they want to with you, too. Whatever you do, please don’t instruct your readers, “Just tell me if I should never write again!” 

Everyone — yes, you included — can improve.

We’ve talked about editing for five weeks now. Those of you following Debi Alper’s superb online Introduction to Self-Editing Your Novel course are reaching its end. (The course is free to members. Interested? Learn more.) And there’s one big topic we haven’t yet broached.

What about third-party help? Do you need it? And when do you need it? And what does an external editor do that a keen self-editor cannot? Today we’ll crack open that can of worms – or rather, we’ll use the handy little ring-pull which enables easy no-crack access.

And let me start by saying two things.

Number one, you don’t get better than a Jericho Writers editor. We use absolutely first class people and we scrutinise their work and if they don’t meet our standards – consistently – they will stop being a Jericho Writers editor.

The quality of editing is not something you can easily tell from a resumé. We have some spectacular editors who have not written bestsellers, or commissioned Hilary Mantel and Dan Brown and the entire Where’s Wally series. But those people are spectacularly good at editing, which is why we use them. So: if you do choose to get third-party editing, you’re in very safe hands with us.

Number two: you don’t need third-party editing. You may want it. You would certainly draw value from it. But you don’t need it. My first book never got third-party editing before I went out to agents. (I wanted it, but couldn’t afford it). But I secured an agent without too much fuss, then had a multi-publisher bidding war for the book, and it became a bestseller. So: good results can happen with no early third-party involvement.

And yes, it’s true that more and more writers are using external editors early on in their journey, and yes, it’s true that that does somewhat alter an agent’s perceptions of what to expect. But that doesn’t amount to me saying that you need an editor. You may not. I got an agent because I wrote a 180,000 word manuscript and I got an agent sitting up till 2.00 in the morning because she couldn’t go to bed until she’d finished it. That’s the basic outcome that you need to achieve. There is no single way to achieve it.

So – I’ve plugged our services (honestly) and I’ve told you (also honestly) that you may not need them. But now let’s dig into the ins and outs of all this. Here are some guidelines to hold onto.

Know the craft

You probably won’t get a novel to a truly publishable standard unless you know your craft. I don’t care how you acquire that knowledge – books and blogs, festivals and feedback groups, courses and classes: they’re all good. But know your craft. You won’t be properly attuned to the countless errors you can make until you’ve done that groundwork.

Edit hard – harder than you think

My first novel was 180,000 words long. When I got to the end of it, I realised I’d got better as I’d gone on. So I deleted the first 60,000 words and rewrote them.

I edited so many times that (going slightly crazy and getting close to the finish line) I went through the whole damn book just to delete surplus commas. (A copy-editor later put them all back, but she put a nice curl on them and settled them just so.)

As a very rough rule of thumb, half your time should be spent writing and another half editing. If one half is going to be bigger, I’d make it the editing half.

I stress this, because you will get vastly more value from a JW editor if you’ve done the work yourself first. Sometimes we get people who send us their manuscripts, and we come back with a report that says Character X is missing this, and Plot Point Y is awry because of that and so on. And the writer tells us, in effect, “Yes, I know all that, but if I fix those things, then what?”

And … well, we’re not magicians. We can only read what’s on the page. Ideally, you would only come to us for editing help if (i) you find yourself going round in circles or (ii) you just don’t know what to do next. But put in the hard yards yourself first. We can be much more productive if you do.

Nothing wrong with testing the water first

Approaching agents is free. Getting editing help from us costs. So a perfectly sensible strategy is this:

1. Write a book
2. Edit the heck out of it
3. Send it to around 10 agents; see what they say
4. If they take you on, then yippedee-doo-dah. Happy days. If they don’t, then …
5. Either:
   1. Re-edit the work if something an agent has said gives you a flash of insight. You can send it out again if you genuinely feel that flash has been transformative. or
   1. Come to us for a manuscript assessment.

I wouldn’t go crazy with the agent submissions. I think it’s just disrespectful to bombard agents. But sending out material to 10-12 agents? Nowt wrong with that.

How to use advice

Because I’ve just spoken about agents and any feedback you may get from them, let me just say now that editorial advice is only ever advice. It’s not a command. It’s not a stone tablet, ablaze with light, brought wonderingly down the slopes of Mount Sinai.

If a particular comment gives you a moment of insight, of recognition, of YES, then work with it. If a comment just doesn’t quite make sense to you, then leave it. Or, to be more accurate: consider it. Very often, an editor may feel a discomfort around X, but their practical suggestion as to what to do doesn’t feel right. In which case, figure out if you feel the editor was right to have that discomfort (they usually are), then consider what you want to do about it.

You are the boss of your own words, always. You should never write text at someone else’s bidding if it doesn’t feel right to you. As a very rough guide, about 60% of the time, you’ll feel that an editor is spot on. A further 20% of the time, you’ll think, “right issue, wrong solution” and go your own way on the topic. And there’s a good chunk of the time where (especially if you’re a stubborn sod, like me) you just think, “No, I like what I wrote” and take no action at all.

When you really, really should come to us for help

Mostly, I think it’s totally up to you when and whether you want to use our editorial help. There’s just one category, where I think you’re pretty much nuts if you don’t use us. I’m thinking here of writers who have had a lot of “almost but not quite” type rejections from agents. If you keep coming close to the prize, then – sweet Lord – get yourself over the line. There’s nothing more powerful than third-party editorial advice in improving a manuscript. It won’t always work to get you over that line, but there ain’t nothing better.

What help to get when?

The default for almost everyone should be a full manuscript assessment. With that, you get a pro editor to read every darn page of your work and give you a detailed, detailed report on what’s working and (especially) what isn’t working and how to fix it. This, in effect, is the backbone of any big publisher’s editorial process. Every manuscript I’ve ever written has gone through that process. Every single one has been improved (except maybe for one, where I had a terrible editor who butchered the book, then published it badly, and lost a ton of money on it. But that really is a rare exception.)

If you’ve already had a manuscript assessment and you think you’re close to the finish line, then you could think about getting a development edit. With that, you get the detailed report AND on-page text commentary and correction. I don’t really like that as a starter service though for anyone. If your book has some fundamental issues (and most books that come to us do), then the on-page correction is effectively swatted aside by some of the more structural edits that are needed. It makes no sense to wallpaper a room, if some of the walls are in the wrong place. But if your manuscript is close to the finish line, then, for sure, a development edit has its place. Our office team won’t let you do a dev edit before you’re ready, so feel free to have an open discussion with them about options.

And finally, there’s the whole area of copy-editing with lighter (proofreading) and heavier (line-editing) flavours available.

Most writers won’t need those services at all. If you get traditionally published, your publisher will pay for all that stuff. You can just sit back and admire those handsomely placed commas.

The group that will certainly need copy-editing is anyone heading for self-publishing: these days, you just can’t hope to win with a shoddily presented manuscript. A scattered group that may think copy-editing is wise includes anyone with sensible reason to doubt their presentation (eg: English as a second language, or dyslexia.)

Either way though. The “edit hard yourself” rule still applies. Sometimes we get a really poorly presented manuscript and the writer is assuming that our copy-editor will just work a kind of magic with it. Not so, old buddy, not so. Your job here is the same: bring the editor the cleanest manuscript you possibly can. I guess a copy-editor picks up 95% or maybe even 99% of issues, but if you have hundreds and thousands of errors and problems scattered through the text, no editor will pick them all up.

The sorrow and the joy

Don’t expect editorial feedback to be an all-joyous thing. It isn’t. You bring us your precious baby hoping for us to dart her off to some Festival of Glorious Infants … but instead, we’re much more likely to tell you that your lovely babe has some terrible problems and will need immediate surgery.

I honestly want to tell our editorial clients to wait 48 hours before emailing us after an MS assessment. You’re likely to have some shock and/or upset, before that gives way to a kind of relieved euphoria. The euphoria, were it to speak, would say (in ancient Greek of course, but I’ll translate), “Wise editor, you have found what is worthy in my book and what is to be cast out. I venerate all that you have done and know that my feet are now set on the path of Righteous Endeavour.”

You will feel relieved (to have the issues made clear to you) and energised (because you know just what to do and how to do it.) You should also feel the book rebuilding itself as you work on it. You should feel it becoming steadily and predictably better as you go through your to do list.

For some writers, this is a one-off process. For others, it isn’t. There’s no right or wrong; only what’s right for you.

If you want to know more, contact our office team (you can just hit reply). They won’t try to sell you anything that’s not right for you. Our only real instruction to them is “honesty, always.”

That’s it from me. Debi’s Last Assignment follows …

Til soon, 

Harry 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY:

This week, it’s Assignment Six from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

Revise a scene from your novel, applying the techniques you’ve learned from this course. Share in the forum. Make sure to add feedback on others.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here!Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

Til soon.

Harry

Before I wrote Flat 401, I worked for over a decade as a clinical psychologist. I spent years learning to understand the human mind and people’s experiences, and training to be able to help people overcome emotional challenges. At the time, I didn’t think of it as ‘preparation for novel-writing,’ but it turned out to come in handy!

Below are five ways my clinical background has informed how I write; I hope you might use these ideas too.

1. Tension: threat, not just action

In Compassion-Focused Therapy, we talk about the threat system - the part of the brain that activates when something feels dangerous. Importantly, it doesn’t distinguish between actual threat and perceived threat. The same group of physiological responses can be triggered by a near car crash or by a passive-aggressive text from your partner.

In fiction, this means tension doesn’t require a gun or a chase scene. It can be built on what a character believes might happen: being found out, losing face, hurting someone they love. If your character feels threatened - socially, emotionally, psychologically - the reader will too.

Tip: Identify what your character is afraid of losing (status, safety, love, control), put it in jeopardy – and make sure the reader can see and understand this.

2. Complex characters often don’t act in their own best interests

In the therapy room, people rarely show up with clear motivations. Or, they might express a motivation (‘I don’t want to be depressed or anxious’) but have understandable difficulty getting on board with the path towards that goal – because it’s hard.

Characters don’t need to be likeable (it’s often said), but the more memorable ones do need to be layered. Often, the richest characters are the ones whose behaviour is coherent, but not always free of contradictions.

Tip: Ask yourself, what does this character do that inadvertently sabotages themself? Put some of that into action by showing the unintended negative consequences of them pursuing (or avoiding pursuing) their goals.

For the past four weeks, I’ve talked in detail about how I personally edit a book. Today, I’m still talking about editing, but I want to focus in on the two lode-stars by which I steer. 

The first, always, is pedantry. If you’ve done one of my Live Edit webinars (open to all Premium Members) you’ll know that I’m very, very picky. I always urge those listening to offer their reflections in the chat, but I think it’s safe to say that no one has ever out-pedanted me. 

I care about: 

• Surplus words 

• Irritating commas, or their irritating lack 

• Slightly poor word choices 

• Slightly over-familiar imagery 

• Use of body-part type sentences that are a lazy way to denote feelings 

• Settings that lack real atmosphere 

• Hurrying the delivery of information that could safely be delayed 

• And of course, hunger and world peace, obviously. But I was focusing more on the editorial stuff. 

And that’s not – not even remotely – a complete list of my nitpicks. And yes: any nitpick improves a sentence, but it also, nearly always, points to something a bit bigger. Here’s a tiny example: 

“His words sprayed out incessantly, like water gushing from a broken hose.” 

That’s the kind of thing that would reliably bother me. A hose can’t really be broken, can it? It can be kinked, or punctured, or it can be sliced through, but none of those things are really quite the same as ‘broken’. 

But in any case, the first half of the sentence says ‘sprayed’, the second part says ‘gushing’. A gush is not the same as a spray. Which is it? One implies wide distribution, the other implies narrow-but-abundant distribution. Which way we go here indicates what we’re trying to say about the voluble fellow in the sentence. Is he talking to a large audience or just to one person? We need to fit the image to the situation. 

Whatever the final set of choices here, the image will improve. 

That’s a tiny example. But the picky observation very often widens out into something bigger. 

For example, if you find yourself making a lot of deletions in a particular chapter, simply as part of your “murder all unnecessary words” programme, you may end up realising that this particular chapter has a lot of dead-feeling material. And that may cause you to rethink whether you need the chapter at all. And you may find ways of take the necessary new information / developments from that chapter and deploying them elsewhere. And you may end up reshaping your book in a way that makes a really significant improvement to the flow and feel of that awkward middle section. 

Another common phenomenon: you notice a lot of body-part language. “Her lower lip trembled and she felt the sting of salt tears rising in her eye.” That kind of thing. 

Now there’s a lot that I don’t love there, but the worst bit is that we’re trying to describe a person’s emotions via lip-movements and eye-salt-levels, instead of (duh!) just describing the person’s emotions. “She felt shocked, an almost physical buffet, but following close behind was a kind of horrified sadness, a sense of loss. Could it be that she had lost everything she had fought so hard to keep? And lost everything, in a single minute, through this almost trivial moment of ill-luck?” 

And again, that minor-seeming insight into a dodgy sentence can end up making a difference to the entire book. 

So much for pedantry. But there is also a kind of poetry, or should be, that grows the more you edit. I don’t mean you’re about to win sing-writing festivals or get shelved next to Beowulf… but, there’s a way that you write, that sounds right for you. You want to keep that.  

When it comes to your agent and your editor and your copy-editor, you’ll find there are times that they want to snip away at things that make you you. Walk amongst them unsnipped. These days, I tend to issue a (perfectly polite) note to copyeditors, explaining the aspects of my writing that are non-standard (e.g.: lots of sentence fragments, sentences starting with a conjunction, and so on) that I wish to keep. 

Equally, I’ve had instructions from an editor, that I’ve just ignored – sometimes, but not always, with a word of explanation. That doesn’t make me a crotchety writer; I’m not that. It just makes me a writerly writer: ones who chooses, with care, the words he wants to appear in print. 

Do likewise. 

Til soon, 

Harry

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Five from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course.

(This fantastic, self-directed video course is FREE to Premium Members. If you’re not one yet, you know what to do: join us here! Alternatively, you can buy the course as a one-off for £99.)

Debi would like you to:

• Pick a short paragraph from your novel that includes prose, description, and dialogue, then check for the points mentioned in lesson five of the course.
• When you're ready, log in to the forum and share your work. Make sure to add feedback on other people's work, too!

Let’s face it - there’s nothing like a good plot twist. That delicious moment when your jaw drops, your brain short-circuits, and you immediately flip back a few pages muttering, “Wait, WHAT?”

Contrary to popular belief, plot twists are NOT just for crime writers. Whether you're working on a thriller, a romance, a fantasy epic, or even a literary darling, the plot twist is the literary version of a mic drop - and readers absolutely eat it up.

But why do we love plot twists so much? And more importantly, how do you pull one off without making readers roll their eyes so hard they sprain something?

Let’s twist again, like we did last chapter... (Ba du dum.) 

Why plot twists are so addictive

Plot twists are the espresso shot in your story cappuccino. They jolt readers awake. They make people text their friends at 2 a.m. with “YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK.” They’re proof that the author is five steps ahead, cackling behind the scenes, and we love being fooled like that.  

A good twist does three things: 

• Surprises the reader

• Makes sense in hindsight

• Changes the direction or emotional tone of the story. 

When done well, twists make readers feel smart for spotting the clues - or wonderfully blindsided if they didn’t. Either way, it’s a win. 

Plot twists across genres

You don’t have to write a psychological thriller to serve up a killer twist (though, let’s be real, they practically require one).

Here's how to tailor twists to different genres: 

Crime / Thriller / Mystery 

The plot twist is your bread and butter here. 

Classic moves: The killer was the narrator. The victim faked their death. The detective was the criminal. 

Pro tip: Leave breadcrumbs, but scatter them wide enough that readers miss the loaf. For more advice on pulling this off perfectly, be sure to check out our Crime Writing For Beginners video course with Graham Bartlett. Alternatively, if you’re after that extra level of support, consider our tutored Writing Crime and Thriller Novels course (starting 1 September)... 

University creative writing courses absolutely have their place. Plenty of people get a huge amount out of them. If that’s you, I’m genuinely pleased. Writing should be joyful, and if a university course lit that fire for you, brilliant. 

But they’re not for everyone — and they’re not for me. 

Here’s why I’ve always struggled with the university model (with all due respect to the exceptions out there): 

• They often overlook genre fiction, which is where the vast majority of readers (and many writers) live 

• They’re often run by people with slender commercial track records 

• They don’t tend to focus on the business side of writing — things like agents, submission, and marketing 

• Self-publishing is often ignored entirely 

• It’s rare to get feedback on an entire manuscript, start to finish 

• They don’t properly grapple with plot (because that’s not something you can do by workshopping a couple of chapters) 

• The focus leans more toward earning a degree than getting a damn book published 

Now, none of that makes university courses bad — it just means they have different goals. I care far more about getting a book published than I do about getting a degree. Your preferences may vary and it’s perfectly OK if they do. 

But the reason I raise this is the workshopping phenomenon. Here’s how it works: 

A university gathers together a bunch of people who care a lot about words and writing. They set a challenge: you’re going to write the kind of book that might get published by a cool literary imprint somewhere. Then, they ask Anna to read out 1– 2,000 words of her draft novel, so that Brian and Ciara and Dan and Ezzie and the rest of them can offer their thoughts. This whole process is overseen by an Author of a couple of works, often not even full novels, (whom two of the students secretly fancy) and it’s important to all of the students that they have the approbation of the Author of the two SLNs and so Brian and Ciara and all the rest of them get stuck in and try to show off how cool and literary they are as they give Anna her feedback. 

And look: there are worse things in the world. In fact, what I’ve just described is among life’s better things and loads of people who go through one of these courses will enjoy one of the most rewarding years of their life. So good. If that’s your thing, then go for it. (Though, uh, read the PSes below before you sign up for anything.) 

My reason for telling you all this? Because of the phenomenon that is the Universal Workshop Voice. It’s a thing. I’ve given classes in the past where someone reads me a snatch of their work and I can identify – immediately and accurately – that this has been through the university-style workshopping process. 

A paragraph might start out like this: 

A fly, a fat one, landed on his forearm. Ulf stared at it for a moment, then swatted it with his free hand, killing it. Leaving a fat purple stain, and nothing else. 

I don’t know if that paragraph has any merit. I just made it up now for the purpose of this email. Whether it would ever find a place in one of my books, I don’t know. Probably not. But if you ran that paragraph past Anna and Brian and the gang, it would turn into something like this: 

A fly, fat and freighted with the alien armaments of its kind, landed on his forearm. The blow, when it arrived, shocked even Ulf with its ferocity, a blow born of some dark ancestral killing field, a rapid-fire conversation between neurons that left Ulf himself a mere bystander. Where once there had been insect there was now only pulp, grapey and softly dripping. 

And I don’t even hate that. I mean: I can’t quite imagine wanting to read that book, but maybe someone would. 

Really, my concern here is that Anna’s piece, Brian’s, Ciara’s, Dan’s and Ezzie’s are all sounding pretty damn similar – and they’re sounding similar because the workshopping process exerts the same basic gravity on them all. 

And from my personal editing process, that’s not what I want at all. 

I want to sound like me. I uncover what my tastes are by just going at my manuscript, again and again, sentence by sentence, page by page. I don’t know if that produces the best book. It probably doesn't. I mean: if Hilary Mantel or Sally Rooney or Gillian Flynn were to edit one of my first draft manuscripts, presumably it would start to take on their particular genius-level shine. 

But sod em. I don’t care. This is my book not theirs, and I don’t want their tastes interfering – and I definitely don’t want the Author of two barely-novels to exert any weight at all. And Ezzie? Nice girl and all that, but she can shove off. I don’t want her tastes (or Anna-Brian-Ciara-Dan’s) anywhere near my word-choices. 

I suppose I could justify my attitude in commercial terms – agents and editors prioritise authors with a distinctive voice. Readers probably do too, if only in the sense that those books wind up more memorable. 

But that’s kind of fake. My motive isn’t really commercial; it’s just my personal version of bolshiness. I don’t want to write like Ezzie. I want to write like me. 

And the way I do it? Editing and editing and editing and editing. And yes, using my knowledge of craft to shape my decisions. But mostly working with my own taste. What sounds like me? What do I think is funny? What atmosphere feels right for this scene? Is this sentence better as 10 words or 8? Or lose it completely? 

And flies freighted with alien armaments? Yes gods. Spare me. I’m pleased the damn thing got splattered. 

Til soon, 

Harry 

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Four from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here, or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a short paragraph from your novel and experiment with different POV’s. If you’re working with multiple characters, ensure each voice is clearly different. Post in the forum (remember to log in first) and share which POV you’ve decided on and why. See if others agree with you.

Once you’ve submitted your manuscript – for a critique, or even to an editor – you will receive a number of responses. Amongst the most common is: “But I just didn’t like the main character.” This can be very dispiriting to hear, particularly if you’ve put enormous amounts of effort into your hero. But if somebody feels it, there’s a good chance that they’re right. 

The tricky thing, of course, is understanding what it is that makes a character likeable.  A corollary to this is “relatable”. There is a maxim that a reader must be able to “relate” to a main character; that is, put him or herself into that character’s shoes. I don’t particularly subscribe to this theory – I no more relate to Achilles in the Iliad  than I do to Dorothea in Middlemarch – but I still want to read about them. However, this is something that concerns editors and readers alike, and in order to work within the modern book market, it's absolutely something that must be considered. 

It is also the case that you want your protagonist to be human: that is, to err, to be impulsive, jealous sometimes, angry when things don’t go well. Think of Bridget Jones and her pratfalls. A character who is entirely good is simply flat, like a pious child in a Victorian children’s book. 

There are many examples of protagonists whose very weaknesses are what make us empathise with them: this is often the case in tragedy.  Othello’s jealousy is something we can understand, and in him we see it extending far beyond the usual bounds. Yet we also see someone whose jealousy we don’t understand: that is, the villain, Iago.  

What’s the difference? It’s the age-old distinction between protagonist and antagonist. They will have similar qualities: bravery, quick-wittedness perhaps, intelligence certainly. But it’s how they use those qualities which compels us either to like or to despise them. If the intelligence is used for selfish or cowardly ends, as with Iago, then we hate him; if the intelligence is blinded by love, as with Othello, then we empathise and, indeed, sympathise. 

Here are some pointers, then, to consider, when you’re crafting your likeable protagonist. 

1. Situation 

Your character can be in a position of power, or in a more relative position of weakness. It is often suggested that protagonists in positions of power are not “relatable”. Again, I don’t like this line of thought, as fiction is about exploring other worlds, including those of people who hold power. We need to be able to explore what the rich think, as well as the poor; all minds and all milieus are the realm of fiction.  

However, it’s still important to render your protagonist likeable within that role. A king can be kindly, for example, and still be a king – and through him, we can still explore what it means to be a king.  

Resist the temptation to put your character in a bad situation simply in order to engender sympathy. Writers can go too far in this direction, by loading misfortunes onto the protagonist. Keep it straightforward and remember that it’s about emotional connection: we want the protagonist to be in a better place by the end, which means psychologically, not necessarily in physical terms.  

Continue here for How I actually edit (IV) here.

Over the last couple of weeks, in celebration of our new Introduction to Self-Editing video course, I’ve spoken about how I (repeatedly and compulsively) correct my manuscript before I ever get to the holy words, THE END. 

Once I do hit those words, I’ll do multiple edits thereafter – some of them with a single, targeted purpose. Other times driven by a much more general hunt for dissatisfaction. On those hunts, I’m always looking for something I don’t love. That’s it. Anything that offends me, or niggles at me. Sand in the shoe: that kind of annoyance, both minor and impossible to ignore. 

Every writer knows that, yes, yes, you have to delete surplus words. Stephen King (a former journalist) once tossed out the idea that the final draft needs to be first draft minus 10%. 

And, OK, that’s not a horrible rule, so SK’s first drafts were probably leaner than most, because he was a professional writer before he ever became a novelist. But SK clearly doesn’t follow his own rule these days, because his work has become quite baggy. And in any case, it makes no sense to set a target for deletions. You have to let your manuscript tell you how long it wants to be. I’d guess that a majority of you need to cut more than just 10%. Cuts of 20-30% are often, often essential. We once made a bestseller by doing a hands-on edit of a manuscript that took it from 180,000+ words to about 90,000. 

There are two reasons why this whole economy drive matters. 

The first is simply that the force of a novel comes down to this equation: 

Force = Emotional power divided by the number of words. 

If the first term remains constant, then just cutting the second one will always, always improve things. 

That sounds dully mechanical, but I’m repeatedly struck by how relentless cutting delivers a kind of magic. Sticky mid-book patches in a novel can throw a somewhat glum, depressed feel over the whole damn thing. Brutal, hard cutting can just relieve that at (almost) a stroke. Two to three days spent on deletions make more of a reliable impact than any other editing intervention I can think of. The novel lifts in the water. Feels harder. Sails faster. The whole craft has more purpose. 

Cutting does that every time. Wow. 

But the other big reason I love cutting is that it exposes the gaps. If your writing is flabby and unconcentrated, you can easily fail to notice that there may be huge things you aren’t saying. You have this background sense of “this writing is possibly a little baggy,” so maybe you make some cuts to address that issue, but you don’t go far enough, so the issue nags anyway. 

But –  

Because you’ve used one paragraph instead of one sentence to get your characters out of the gym and into the taxi, and because you’ve used two sentences to describe clothing, and one to describe a coffee spillage, you think (correctly) that it’s high time you got your character to meet her partner for the Big Argument. So you rush her off to her Big Argument, but never realise all the stuff you haven’t done. Have you properly described the setting where the Big Argument takes place? Did you depict her emotions in the taxi? Did you add a hint of that past infideility which is colouring her perspective?

The best way to find gaps in your manuscript is to cut so hard that there’s no excess verbiage to cover them. Once you strip back the word count, you start to feel where the novel feels empty – lacking. So you add those things back (but rich text, not duplicative, pointless text) and your novel stays lean – but takes on whole layers of new meaning. 

This is a beautiful discipline, because the stuff you cut is always tedious – unnecessarily long ways of saying things that are often quite boring in themselves. Needless dialogue. Statements about settings that really add nothing in terms of atmosphere or feel. 

And then – you see the gaps. Kayleigh is meant to be worried about her upcoming meeting with Jon, but she’s hardly given him a thought – all that clothes description and coffee spillage got in the way. And how could she be going through all this and not be thinking about what happened to her mother under the exact same circumstances 25 years earlier? And what was it like to enter a completely empty house, its front door swinging open and water everywhere? 

The gaps you find are always more interesting than the text you removed, so the whole passage (and the whole book) just gets more layered and dense and powerful. 

If you want more on this, I talk about it in my How To Write a Novel course and, in even more depth, in our Take Your Novel From Good To Great course. Both those courses are free to Premium Members, and if you haven’t yet caught up with the relevant bits, then I’d strongly recommend that you do. If you’re not yet a PM, you can get a taster lesson for free here. Or, why not become a PM today? It’s like wearing a rainbow in your hair, but not as damp. 

That’s it from me. Last Sunday, my girls had a football tournament. And look, I love my kids, and it’s great that girls are into football now, and there’s everything to be said for community endeavour, and there was a pizza van there and almost-adequate coffee. 

But – oh sweet Lord – we started before 8.00 am. And didn’t finish until after 5.00. And I had to watch every damn game. Every damn one, both girls. And now whenever I close my eyes, I see yards and yards of blue nylon, and sunshine, and kids air-kicking balls as they rolled gently along an empty goalmouth.

I earned beer that night, and plenty of it. 

Til soon. 

Harry

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Three from Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course. (It's FREE to Premium Members! And if you’re not a Premium Member, you know what to do: join us here,or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a paragraph from your novel that has a strong voice, check for the points mentioned in the lesson, and post it in the forum.

Last week, I talked about my micro-editing habit. This week, we expand a bit. The kind of editing I’m going to talk about here is something I also do in the course of writing the first draft, but it operates at a less micro-level.

I told you that I find it hard to make forward progress if I know that parts of the manuscript behind me are messy – and I write detective novels, whose construction is intricate. I don’t plot out my books in huge advance detail. (I might do, if I thought I could do it, but I can’t, so I don’t.)

(Oh yes, and this email is all about editing, because Assignment Two of Debi Alper's Introduction to Self-Editing course is live and online right now.)

The kind of things that might send me scurrying backwards are things like:

Character change

In one of my books, something wasn’t working – and I realised that by making a key character male, and in very male surroundings, I had lost something that I wanted. So I jumped back, and made that person a woman: a commanding, powerful, unsettling presence. That shift unlocked something for me; it opened narratives that wouldn’t have existed with a man in that same role.

That’s an example of why I think that in-draft edits can be almost essential at times. Why charge on with writing your draft if you know that you made a misstep early on? Correct that misstep and then see what you have? Yes, you lose time in making the correction, but you’re going to have to make it anyway – and by making it early, you avoid compounding your error.

Plot complications

The architecture of a complex mystery novel is at the outer end of fictional complexity. For me, a good detective novel should make perfect sense as you read it – and does, in fact, make a kind of mathematically complete sense if properly analysed – but readers should also be a bit challenged by it. Ask someone to summarise who-did-what-to-whom-and-why in, say, a Raymond Chandler novel and most readers would turn a little white.

That’s a sweet, enjoyable challenge for the reader, but for me as author, it’s kind of head-wrenching. “Oh hold on, I need a way for X to have escaped from secure confinement, but he also needs to have chosen to go back in, but he needs to have done so in a way that Y couldn’t have known about, so ….”

Those thoughts are crucial to good fiction-making and, for me, they’re ones I always deal with as they arise. Again, getting these things right are (for me) key to forward motion. If I just try to plough on knowing that there are tweaks to make behind me, it just complicates my whole onward plotting process. Solving the niggles when I see them basically removes them from my mental to-do list and makes it easier to focus on what lies ahead.

Settings

Settings are like a character in my books. If a key setting is awry, that also feels like a block to forward progress, so I’ll go and scratch away at the issue until it feels sorted.

Boring bits

And look, no first draft is ever perfect. My first drafts are pretty decent … but that’s only because they’ve been heavily revised before I even hit the final full stop. But, as I work, I’m also generally on the lookout for any material that just seems heavy, long-winded, dull, repetitive, undramatic – anything along those lines.

The reason is partly my messy-room aversion. But it’s also because a boring bit definitely tells you that there’s a problem which needs addressing – but it also often indicates a fundamental plot problem that needs sorting out.

So, let’s take the sort of example that I often run up against. We might have a situation like this:

• There’s a murder and an investigation
• Things go well for a bit, then the regular police investigation starts running into problems and looks like it’s going nowhere. (This kind of issue is basically compulsory in my kind of fiction. The only alternative is that the police are busily chasing up the wrong set of leads.)
• So there often needs to be an “oh, no, this isn’t working” bit … which can often look a bit dull, because it is frustrating to those involved.

Now that’s all fine, except that what if the boring bit is too long? Quite often, the writer – me, for example – will create something dramatic in order to break the tedium. A man with a gun. An assault. A terrible revelation. And it’s easy to think, “Oh great, off we trot again. There was a dull bit, but it was only a few pages long, and now we’re on the road again.”

And OK, that approach may be just what your book needs … but maybe 50% of the time what it really needed was you to go back and delete the boring bit. The added drama now just locks in that boring bit and sets you off on the wrong path.

In the end, any bad bit in your book is telling you that there’s an issue and you may need to delete the last 5,000 words, say, to get back to the last bit where you felt truly settled. Plot is a sequence of stones laid one upon the other. If you sense a wobble, go back to the wobble. Sort it out. Then start building again.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

This week, it’s Assignment Two from Debi’s Introduction to Self-Editing course. (Free to Premium Members. And if you’re not a Premium Member, then don’t be a Hufflepuff – slither in to membership here or buy the course as a one-off for £99 here.)

So, Debi wants you to:

• Find a paragraph from your novel that focuses on one of your characters and post it in the forum.
• Check for the points mentioned in this lesson, and don’t forget to offer feedback to others.

Til soon.

Harry

You’ve completed a draft of a novel? Congratulations! That’s a huge achievement and one you should celebrate. But now the hard work starts because the first draft of anything is crap.

We all work in different ways but fiddling with every word you write in a first draft can kill your creativity. If you invest too much time in perfecting your prose early on, you may find it harder to murder those carefully crafted darlings when you come to edit and realise that whole scene serves no purpose.

But a first draft is also perfect simply because it exists, and now you have something to work on. Exciting, right?

Here are my six tips for the self-editing process - all of which I cover in more detail on my Introduction to Self-Editing Your Novel video course, which is free to Premium Members.

1. Start with the big picture and ask yourself some searching questions

• What is this book?
• Where will it sit in bookshops? Is it crime, fantasy, romance? Literary or commercial?
• Who are your target readers? What are you offering them that is different from every other novel in that genre?

Now zoom into the specifics of your book... 

• Title
• Elevator pitch and blurb
• Synopsis.

These things help you to define the identity of your novel – and everything in the draft should expand from that central identity. A synopsis is particularly useful for establishing the spine of your story, the pivots and the turning points – as well as highlighting any sub-plots and diversions you may decide to get rid of. 

2. Look at the structure

Where does your story start?

If the first line of your synopsis refers to something that happens three or four chapters into your draft, that’s probably a sign you have started your story too early and have written your way in. Don’t panic! Nothing is ever wasted in creative writing. Those chapters were there because you, the author, needed them – but the reader doesn’t, so they have to go.

It’s also possible to start your story too late, e.g., when you’re desperate to grab the reader’s attention on the first page - so the story starts with a bang but then the next chapter moves to backstory. The first chapter promises something which then isn’t fulfilled. In this case, it might be better to start the story earlier in time.

Where does it end?

Somewhere close to the end, there should be a peak to your narrative arc: the point where everything is at its most endangered, when everything could be won or lost, and the stakes are at their highest.

After that, the resolution has to be credible as a believable result of everything we’ve seen so far. It also needs to satisfy your target readers. If you’re writing crime, fans of the genre will expect the bad guys to be held to account at the end. In romance, fans want the happy couple to be together on the last page, having overcome all the obstacles you gave them to handle. But resist the temptation to tie up every thread too neatly. Allow readers to imagine that your characters carry on living after the story ends.

How do you get from the beginning to the end?

Are you writing in a linear, chronological timeline? This works well because things happen to the characters at the same time as the reader experiences them, giving us the best chance to relate to your main characters.

If you’re not showing the action chronologically (e.g., using parallel timelines, or a circular structure) make sure the reader always knows where they are in the timeline and how one scene fits in with the ones we’ve seen before.

Between the beginning and end of your novel, your plot should be a series of peaks and troughs. After any intense action, the characters – and the readers – need a chance to draw breath before they have to deal with a new obstacle. Think in terms of cause and effect, action and consequence, fortunately/unfortunately.

3. Identify the narrative drive

Every scene has to push your story forward in some way or another. Look at each scene, or unit of action, and identify the narrative triangle by writing the following in three sentences:

• Where you start
• What happens
• Where you end up.

If both the plot and the characters are in the same place at the end of the scene as they were at the beginning, that’s a sign the pace has stalled and that scene is not earning its keep.

Hello again! Welcome back to my series of insights into what it is like to work through the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme.  

Month two equals Point of View. An important moment in all writers’ lives: with our fingers pausing above the keyboard, our characters’ voices in our mind’s ear, we have to choose how to represent them on the page. Will the character be an ‘I’, a ‘he’ or a ‘she’? Maybe they’ll even be a ‘you’.  

More decisions: who is the narrator? You - the author, or a character? And how far from the story do they stand as they relate your tale? Are they in the present moment, or in the future describing the past, or even in the past or present describing the future? 

It’s true, Point of View is a technical decision, and a defining one. As my tutor, Andrew Miller, says, it can feel a bit ‘under the bonnet’. I liken it to the moment a builder digs foundations, setting the exact footprint and structure of the house. It can be altered if later you decide to change things… but it’ll cost you. Best to be secure in your choice of how many rooms and floor-levels before the concrete footings get poured. 

I’ve been paying close attention to the tutorials and reading material, figuring out how my two main characters are turning up on the page and trying out different options. Instead of first person, how do they sound in third person close? The effort is paying dividends. I’ve decided to stick with my first instinct – a character narrator in first person peripheral, telling the story of the other character in third person close. Now that I have learned the techniques, listened to the lectures on pros vs cons, I’m able to append my “Err, because I want to” gut feeling with considered justification. And that, my friends, has definitely helped my confidence.  

Confidence is important in this strange and sublime world of conjuring beauty through words on a page. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard suggests painting, unlike writing, pleases the senses while you do it. Indeed! When I am adrift, suffering doubt and imposter syndrome, I have often thought how lucky painters are. What relief it would be to back up one step and see all of it – the whole novel, its brilliance and its weaknesses – and know immediately how to improve it. Reading Annie’s words made me think of the often quoted, “writing is easy, you just sit at the typewriter and bleed”. Whoever it was that actually said this (Quote Investigator steers us away from it being the great Hemingway) I reckon I know the feeling.  

What’s this got to do with Point of View month? Well, I find I am able to push my imposter syndrome demon a little further away every time I improve my technical skills. Gaining a sense of accomplishment - of capability - when it comes to the methodical building blocks of writing gives me solid foundations on which I may play and push my limits. Practicing writing in each point of view means I can demonstrate the benefits of one versus another to myself – and it’s a reminder that this is a key aspect of being a writer I will always have control over: working on my skills. 

Annie Dillard also quotes an unnamed, well-known writer who is asked by a university student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” 

“Well,” the well-known writer said, “I don’t know… Do you like sentences?” 

I do. Sentences and words. This is the level I like to play in, where I feel happiest. This is why month two of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme, in all its technical, structural glory, has been fun. There’s been lots and lots of fascinating insights from the tutors, many excellent exchanges between fellow students and access to a huge well of writing masterclasses. 

Imposter syndrome nerves still lie ahead of me on my road to publication – the thought of trying to sell my writerly wares to the publishing gatekeepers gives me regular heebie-jeebies. But that’s a story for another month – in fact it’ll be the last third or so of the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme’s year when I’ll get expert schooling in the art of confidently querying literary agents.  

For now, from my point of view (written in first person central, present tense, with a sprinkling of second person) it is becoming very clear that structure, support and plenty of hand holding is the Ultimate way. 

I hope you’ll pop by next month when the topic will be ‘Setting’.  

Happy writing, all! 

Rachel

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

If I can win a writing competition, then you can too.

I received notification that I was in the Friday Night Live (but on Saturday) Final at London Festival of Writing on 21 June 2024. I was visiting Italica, an ancient Roman city just north of Seville in Spain, when the email landed. Later that evening, as the sun dipped towards the horizon, I was perched on a golden beach in Algorrobo Costa watching successions of waves fold over before spilling onto the shore. In my journal – it goes everywhere with me – I wrote:

“Friday Night Live (FNL) – I’m one of the lucky eight. How did that happen?”

            Back in 2022, I entered First 500, Jericho’s online competition, with a much less polished opening of my novel. That piece was Highly Commended, though not in the final. But it was encouraging. Much writing time passed.

I completed Jericho’s Ultimate Novel Writing Programme (UNWP) in Spring 2024. And signed up for my first ever Festival of Writing (LFOW). I drafted my historical novel, MANUMISSION*, during the course. I remember preparing my First 500 words carefully before entering FNL. After all, every writer knows their opening page is vital to hook readers with a clear setting and atmosphere, questions raised, and most importantly, a character that readers can invest in. I entered FNL without expectations. For me, it’s easier to set expectations low, rather than be disappointed I didn’t win.

London Festival of Writing 2024 was a fantastic experience. On the day of the Grand Final, I immersed myself in fantastic workshops, learning so much my brain was fit to explode with new ideas. I revealed my horrid imposter syndrome to fellow writers only to discover this is totally normal and affects many creative people. At one point, I took myself off to practice my piece. I read it aloud, slowed the pace, and really thought about what the words meant to me.

The competition took place before the gala dinner. The room was enormous, set for a banquet, and full of people. Finalists were called to the stage in turn to read their work. There’s a special magic forged when a writer’s words fall into the space between them and their audience. After reading, literary agents on the panel gave each finalist generous feedback. Many of us received full manuscript requests. Amazing!

When MANUMISSION won, Debi Alper congratulated me and told me to remember to breathe, the best advice. I’m still grateful and astonished that fellow writers voted for my work. That was the first time I read to a live audience in the room, although I have previously read at online events. Nerves on the day were alleviated by my amazing writing group. Thank you, gang! We were all mentored by Dr Anna Vaught on the UNWC. Friends for life now. We cheer each other on.

Being a FNL winner is an incredible honour, but it also has practical benefits. Two literary agents wish to see my novel when it is ready. I’ve used the prize to help me grapple with tricky structural and line edits. I’m currently on the fourth editing round. My novel is creeping closer to becoming the book I first envisioned.

If you are going to the next LFOW (and you should go – it’s a transformative experience), you are eligible to enter FNL. Believe in your story, hone your opening page, and share it with trusted readers for valuable constructive feedback. Then work on it, and work on it some more. And enter the competition.

I wish you GOOD LUCK!

Kate Sheehan-Finn

*A bit about my book:

At the heart of MANUMISSION, a historical epic set in the second century AD ancient Roman Empire, is an overarching question: who is Barates of Palmyra? This question arose when I first read the bilingual inscription that Syrian Barates commissioned to commemorate his Romano-British wife and freed slave, Regina of the Catuvellauni. The memorial was set up in Arbeia, South Shields, near Newcastle Upon Tyne, in Northeast England. So, what was a Syrian man doing in Britain more than 1800 years ago? MANUMISSION jumps into the gaping holes in the historical and archaeological record to recreate Barates’ adventures.

We’ve all read sentences that made us pause; not because the words moved us profoundly, but because they didn’t sit right. Recently, I read a mystery novel that stereotyped all Hindus as being vegetarian, stating that their homes smelled of garlic and spices. Being a Hindu myself, this didn’t resonate well. I eat most things and I’d like to the think the Coastal Breeze and Wild Rhubarb diffusers I’ve scattered around my home make it smell heavenly! Stereotypes like these are based on assumptions, give readers false impressions and beliefs, and don’t reflect people’s individuality or full humanity.

Whether you’re writing a heart-racing historical romance book, a moving memoir, a corporate blog post or a non-fiction book about the Empire, readers want authenticity. People want to see themselves, their culture, their identity and their experience reflected accurately. Editing with empathy is a responsible way to ensure writing is accurate and respectful across all genres.

What is Authenticity Editing?

It reviews the way marginalised groups, identities, cultures and experiences are portrayed in creative work (e.g. book, script, game, movie, marketing, adverts), and is usually done when creators are exploring unfamiliar topics. For example, if a character has autism and the writer has no experience of this, they can work with an authenticity expert who has autism to accurately represent it.

Authenticity editing uncovers unconscious bias, stereotypes, offensive content, clichés and inaccurate facts that writers unintentionally include.

Why does it matter?

Everyone has the creative freedom to write what they want. You don’t have to follow Mark Twain’s famous piece of writing advice and ‘write what you know’ to avoid being criticised; instead, ‘write what you don’t know’ but do it responsibly and respectfully.

Writers might thoroughly research resources to understand the unfamiliar, but even the well-intentioned writer can get things wrong – a shame when so much time and emotional investment is poured into writing.

Authenticity editing fills writers’ knowledge-gaps and strengthens their work with lived perspectives, ensuring that the language is used contextually, carefully and responsibly to minimise misrepresentation and harmful depictions.

Is Authenticity Editing a form of ‘book policing’?!

Authenticity editing doesn’t have the power to censor books  – the publishing house makes final publication decisions. If representation is poor or harmful, readers might leave negative reviews, critics call out writers on social media or publishers might cancel contracts, leading to reputational risk. Authenticity editing can help writers avoid mistakes that lead to outcry before publishing.

Authenticity Editing matters in every genre

Many people think that authenticity editing is only used to assess race and cultures, but many topics are reviewed which most genres will explore:

• Social identities such as race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, spirituality and religion, disability, body size, socioeconomic status and neurodiversity.
• First-hand experiences that are difficult to portray without experiencing them, e.g. being a carer, fostering or adoption, homelessness, medical conditions, e.g. brain trauma.
• Specialist professional knowledge, e.g. armed forces, healthcare or medical sectors, the police and lawyers, need to be portrayed convincingly.

4 tips for editing with empathy

1. Be curious

When you come across anything that’s outside your knowledge and experience, don’t assume or judge - ask questions. Is the portrayal based on stereotypes or clichés? Is your source of research credible and trusted? Instead of basing things on assumptions from Google searches, reach out to specific communities to explore what they say about being represented. What does their lived experience reveal?

Ever been to a bookstore and wondered what all the little images on the book spines mean? All those H's, penguins and sowers lining the shelves? Well, they are the logos of the publishing companies who have published that book.

Take a look at the rows of books in any bookstore and you will most probably be looking at the emblems for the Big 5 publishers and their many imprints, as well as a smattering of independent (indie) publishers.

With so many amazing publishing houses out there, the perfect home for you book may well be out there, but how do you know where to look, and who are the most reputable?

In this article we will be looking at the very best book publishers, how publishing companies work, and how to get published by a traditional publishing house.

The publishing industry can be a little tricky to understand, but by the end of this article you will be armed with all the knowledge you need when it comes to choosing the best book publishing companies for your work.

How Do You Search For A Publisher?

Finding a book publisher can be hard, especially if you're hoping to be traditionally published by some of the top publishers in the business. Where do you begin, and what information is important for you to know before you start submitting your manuscript to some of the largest book publishers? Is there anything to be said for self publishing, and what types of publishing should you avoid?

Do I Need A Literary Agent?

Yes, you will most likely need to be represented by a literary agent before you (via your agent) can start submitting to bigger traditional publishers. Nevertheless, there’s no harm in window shopping; it might even provide you with a focal point if you are still working on getting an agent.

For more information on how to find a literary agent, read more here.

Where To Start

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the number of book publishers out there, I’ll be listing the top five biggest publishing houses, some of the best educational publishers and those who publish children’s books, as well as some of my personal favourite independent book publishers.

Read on to discover the very best publishers, covering all book genres across the globe.

The Big Five Book Publishers

While aiming high can be daunting to some authors, literary agents will often wish to submit your manuscript to the top publishing companies first. After all, not only do they have the most power and influence, but they also know what they're doing - most of them have been publishing books for over a hundred years!

Who Are The Big Five?

The biggest and most successful traditional publishers in the world are often referred to as 'The Big Five'. So I will be starting with them.

These are the five powerhouse trade publishing houses which are most well known and widely recognised. Within them you will find many other recognised imprints (publishing houses owned by them) whose logos appear on the spine on the book.

Let’s take a look at them in more detail.

Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster is where we begin our big five journey, as this publishing company holds an annual revenue of $830 million. They have over 35 imprints, including notable ones such as Howard Books, Scribner, and Touchstone, and they release over 2,000 books a year! Some of their biggest titles as of late are Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat and The Institute by Stephen King.

Founded in 1924, Simon & Schuster remains a prominent publisher today, publishing a variety of genres along with big names such as renown authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jodi Picoult and Philippa Gregory.

They also offer many opportunities for those wanting to pursue a career in publishing and are one of the biggest names in the industry to work.

HarperCollins

With an annual revenue of $1.5 billion, HarperCollins has no shortage of good books and authors.

Their notable imprints include Avon Romance, Harlequin Enterprises, Harper, and William Morrow, and their titles range broadly. Some of the top books as of late are Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis and The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin.

Authors published originally by Harper include Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, H. G. Wells and Agatha Christie. A book deal from this giant will most certainly help with book sales!

With over 100 imprints, this publishing powerhouse also offers a great opportunity to learn about the industry from the best. 

Macmillan Publishers

Established in 1843, Macmillan Publishers is still going strong.

With $1.4 billion in annual revenue, there are many publishing routes and imprints available through them, namely Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Picador, St Martin's Press, and Thomas Dunne Books.

Some of their biggest titles from the recent past that you may have heard of include The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah and Me by Elton John.

With an eclectic list of authors under its belt (from W B Yeats to Leigh Bardugo), and a global market with countless possible genres to publish under, you’d be wise to consider them an ideal place for your book to end up. 

Penguin Random House

Everyone recognises that little penguin on book spines in bookstores, and everyone is familiar with the orange Penguin Classics books, but what else do you know about this iconic publisher?

With over 15,000 books published a year, not only is Penguin Random House one of the top five, it may well be the top of the top five.

Their annual revenue exceeds $3.3 billion, and they have countless notable imprints such as Knopf Doubleday, Crown Publishing, and Viking Press. They also have many famous authors under their wing, including books like The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and The Guardians by John Grisham.

As of 2021, Penguin Random House employs approximately 10,000 people globally and has published 15,000 titles annually under its 250 divisions and imprints.

Hachette Livre

Looking for a European based publisher with more published books a year than Penguin? Then take a look at the Hachette book group.

Hachette Livre has an annual revenue of $2.7 billion and nearly 200 imprints. Some of these include Grand Central Publishing, Little, Brown and Company, Headline, and Mulholland Books.

Their biggest titles in the recent past include Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. they have also published names such as James Patterson, Martina Cole, Donna Tartt, and Celeste Ng.

Growing steadily since their merger in 1992, Hachette Livre has a lot to offer both you and your book.

Best Educational Book Publishers

Looking for a reliable and quality educational book publisher, or someone who specialises in nonfiction titles?

This can be more difficult than you think, but thankfully I’m here to shorten the list for you. These publishers are looking specifically for educational books, quality hardback textbooks and the like.

This won't be helpful if you're looking to get your fictional manuscript published, but if it's educational materials you write, then read on!

Bertelsmann Education Group

Bertelsmann is a media, services and education company that operates in about 50 countries around the world. The online education and service offerings are primarily in the healthcare and technology sectors, as well as in higher education. With an annual revenue of around $300 million, this group has no shortage of educational texts, resources, and reliable online connections.

Scholastic

I can’t recall how many Scholastic book fairs I went to as a child. Perhaps you went to some as well, given that Scholastic is both an educational publisher and a popular children’s publisher.

Their book sales are always consistent and their annual revenue is roughly $1.7 billion. Their notable imprints include Arthur A. Levine, Klutz Press, and Orchard Books. While their educational books are extremely popular for grades K-12, their YA fiction remains the most popular (no doubt you’ve heard of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, right?).

Pearson Education

Have you ever used DuoLingo for your language learning needs? Did you know that Pearson Education has recently partnered with them?

There’s a lot of other notable mentions surrounding Pearson, such as their annual revenue of $1 billion, and their well-known imprints (Adobe Press, Heinemann, Prentice Hall, Wharton Publishing). Their most popular publications are always subject textbooks for higher education, and for good reason.

McGraw-Hill Education

One of the largest publishers in American education is Mcgraw-Hill. Their annual revenue often exceeds $1.7 billion, and they are well known for their many editions of test prep books (SAT and ACT) and elementary school math textbooks.

Their most notable imprints include Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, and McGraw-Hill Higher Education, no doubt familiar to you if you’ve been involved in any American education system.

Wiley

While Wiley has a lot to offer in terms of non-educational publishing, their For Dummies series of educational books is one of their top sellers.

With an annual revenue of $1.7 billion, their various instructional titles are big hits in the publishing world. Their most notable imprints include Bloomberg Press, Capstone, Hungry Minds, and Wiley-Blackwell, and they continue to publish a large variety of titles, both educational and otherwise.

Cengage Learning

Publishing both hard cover print books and maintaining a dedicated digital library can be difficult, but Cengage learning can do it all.

From imprints that publish specifically for grades K-12 as well as books for higher education learning, Cengage is a wonderful publisher to consider. Cengage is also the owner of the National Geographic Education division, made to bring excitement to classrooms worldwide.

With an annual revenue of $1.7 billion, it’s safe to say that this publisher is one of the educational publishing powerhouses.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

You may have already heard of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or HMH for short.

This publisher specializes in different disciplines including business and economics, biography and memoirs, children’s books, cookbooks, health and wellness, and more. They make more than $1.4 billion annually, with many notable imprints: Clarion, Graphia, John Joseph Adams Books, and Sandpiper among them.

Their largest and most recent titles include elementary school textbooks in all subjects, as well as cookbooks.

Best Children’s Book Publishers

Some of the top selling books published today are for children or young adults. However, writing and publishing for children and young adults can be a lot harder than you would think!

Although young adult novels have really flown off the shelves in the last twenty years, and often offer the most variety in terms of diversity, content and audience, young adult fiction, middle grade fiction and picture books still remain one of the most competitive markets in the publishing world.

Here are some of the best choices for children’s book publishing today, and how you can reach out to them (via your literary agent, of course).

Bloomsbury

With offices around the world and prominent publishing houses in both the US and the UK, Bloomsbury Books is a top contender for children’s book publishing (they also publish a vast array of nonfiction books including political nonfiction).

Established in 1986, Bloomsbury has many popular children’s book authors across every age group. With an annual revenue of $150 million, Bloomsbury USA Books for Young Readers was established in 2002. Their YA fiction has grown increasingly popular, their authors often topping the New York Times Bestseller list.

If they're good enough for the likes of J K Rowling, Sarah J Maas, and Samantha Shannon, then I'm sure your book will be more than happy in this home.

Ladybird Books

It's impossible for anyone over the age of thirty to not have fond memories of their first Ladybird hardback book as a child. Who doesn't remember their favourite fairytales presented in that iconic little book with a plump ladybird on the cover?

UK-based and another division of the Penguin Group, Ladybird books is perfect if you’ve got a bedtime story to tell. Their lineup of children’s books is primarily geared toward younger audiences, from toddlers to roughly age ten. They have many award winning series published under their name, including many Peppa Pig books, as well as an educational division with their famous Peter and Jane reading guides and other titles where they have teamed up with names such as BBC Earth.

Their annual revenue is roughly $17 million.

Chronicle Books

San Francisco-based favourite Chronicle Books, with a $10 million revenue, has a wonderful eye for the unique and aesthetic storyteller.

Their children’s books are beloved and unique, and this small independent publisher receives more than 1,000 submissions a month for their young adult department alone! They publish most type of children’s books including activity books, art books, board books, picture books, chapter books, middle grade, games, and gift and stationery items.

Hogs Back Books

Hogs Back Books publishes fiction books aimed at children up to 10, as well as early readers for children up to 14, and teenage fiction.

Amongst its most notable titles, Boris the Boastful Frog was recommended by The Telegraph in 2013 as one of the best books of the year for young children. They are a small family-owned and independent publisher, and the small selection that they choose to publish is beautiful and heartfelt.

Arbordale Publishing

With just about $1 million in annual income, Arbordale Publishing isn’t the largest in US children’s publishing. However, their books are aligned to Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), as well as state education standards.

Arbordale books are vetted by experts and professionals from a variety of organizations including NASA, JPL, Project Learning Tree, USFWS, SeaWorld, the Cherokee Nation and others. They publish an average of 20 books per year.

Immedium

Based in San Francisco, CA, Immedium is influenced by an increasingly diverse world. While they are a small company and make an average of $150k in annual revenue, they have wonderful illustrations and ideas for children’s books. 

Immedium publishes subjects range from eye-catching children’s books to contemporary non-fiction, including commentaries on art, popular culture, and multicultural issues.

Kids Can Press

Kids Can Press is a Canadian-owned publisher of children’s books, with a list of over 500 picture books, non-fiction and fiction titles for toddlers to young adults and an estimated annual revenue of over $10 million. 

The Kids Can Press list includes characters such as Franklin the Turtle—the single most successful publishing franchise in the history of Canadian publishing, which has sold over 65 million books in over 30 languages around the world.

Quirk Books

Looking for a smaller publishing agency for your unique and captivating children’s book?

Publishing only around 25 books a year, Quirk Books is based in Philadelphia and is searching for the most original, cool, and fun ideas out there. Is your book creative enough for Quirk? It’s one of my favourite publishing companies, having taken the helm on series such as the Miss Peregrine anthology by Ransom Riggs, which has won many literary awards.

August House Publishers

A more traditional publishing company, August House Publishers are seeking children’s book authors committed to folktales, diverse and memorable. They enjoy stories from many diverse backgrounds, as well as stories that work well as oral tales, stories meant to be passed on from generation to generation. They also have a soft spot for scary stories and stories that can be used in a classroom environment.

With an annual revenue of roughly $10 million, they produce beautiful children’s books.

ABDO Publishing

With almost $50 million a year in revenue ABDO is a formidable children’s book publisher.

Based in Edina, Minnesota, this family-owned book publishing company specializes in non-fiction books for the school library market. From engaging nonfiction to illustrated titles, ABDO has both educational and fantastical book titles for children of all ages.

Best Independent Book Publishers

Are you looking for a smaller company to publish your book? This is a better option if you are still seeking a traditional publishing company, but want to work with them directly

There are many benefits of working with an independent book publishing company. Smaller companies often accept unsolicited submissions (ie you don't need to have a literary agent and can approach them yourself), especially if the submission is more unique and experimental in nature.

Plus, independent publishers often offer a more hands-on approach for new and inexperienced authors. the downside is that their budgets and reach may not be as large as that of the big five, so you are less likely to get an astronomical advance or become an international bestseller. But it's not impossible!

Let’s check out some of the best in the business...

Autumn House Press

Autumn House Press is an independent, non-profit literary publishing company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that was founded in 1998. They began as a publishing company strictly for poetry, but they have since expanded to include fiction and nonfiction.

Autumn House Press’s especially notable titles include Anxious Attachments by Beth Alvarado and Not Dead Yet and Other Stories by Hadley Moore.

Tupelo Press

Tupelo Press is an American not-for-profit literary press founded in 1999. It produced its first titles in 2001, publishing poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Tupelo Press publishes the winners of its national poetry competitions, as well as manuscripts accepted through general submission. Awards given by Tupelo Press include the Dorset Prize, the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry, and the Snowbound Series Chapbook Award. They have a lot to offer as an independent book publisher.

Influx Press

Hackney-based London independent publisher, Influx Press, was founded in 2011. They focus on site-specific literature closely linked to precise places across the UK and beyond.

They have printed unique books such as How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell and A Door Behind a Door by Yelena Moskovich.

Fledgling Press

Fledgling is an exciting and innovative publisher founded in Edingburgh, Scotland. Their focus is primarily on Scottish talent, but they still consider writers from other parts of the world.

Founded in 2000, Fledgling Press have have launched the writing careers of award winning authors including Helen Grant, Philip Caveney and Alex Nye.

Graywolf Press

Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They publish fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Graywolf Press currently publishes about 27 books a year, including the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, the recipient of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and several translations supported by the Lannan Foundation. Their published work is bold and award winning.

New Directions

New Directions was founded in 1936 and they publish about 30 new titles a year. They publish anything regarding literary fiction, poetry, memoir, nonfiction, and their annual revenue is roughly $1 million per year.

It was the first American publisher of authors including Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.

Tin House Books

Publisher of award-winning books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; home to a renowned workshop and seminar series; and partner of a critically acclaimed podcast, Tin House champions writing that is artful, dynamic, and original.

While they only publish about two dozen books per year, they are all astounding, and you can learn more about their small operation here.

Europa Editions

Europa Editions is an independent trade publisher based in New York. The company was founded in 2005 by the owners of the Italian press Edizioni E/O and specializes in literary fiction, mysteries, and narrative non-fiction. They have a few imprints, namely Tonga Books, and a series for mysteries known as Europa World Noir.

City Lights Publishers

Known for publishing Howl and other poems by Allen Ginsberg, City Lights Publishers is a great independent publishing option. Founded in 1955, with nearly 300 books in print, City Lights publishes cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.

For over fifty years, City Lights has been a champion of progressive thinking, fighting against the forces of conservatism and censorship.

Forest Avenue Press

Forest Avenue Press, founded in 2012 in Portland, Oregon, publishes literary fiction on a joyride and the occasional memoir. While they are currently a small-scale operation, they are growing in popularity in the Pacific Northwest.

And That's Not All Of Them...

And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the best publishers to consider! The best thing to do, when looking at what publisher to approach or consider, is to look at the books you love or that are most similar to your own and look at who publishes them.

You may well be surprised, and they may well not even be on this list (which doesn't make them any less fabulous).

A Publisher For Every Writer

Writing a book and finishing it is a huge achievement in itself. Choosing whether to self-publish, look for an agent, or approach indie publishing houses yourself is the next step..and a large one.

So take your time and choose your route to publication wisely. While I hope you found a few excellent book publishers to consider from this list, do keep in mind that there are many more that are worth your consideration. And however you choose to get your book out into the world (and all options come with a list of pros and cons) they all ultimately all lead to the same thing - holding your book in your hand one day and having others enjoy your words.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Are The Big 5 In Publishing?

• The big five publishers in the world are:
• Harper Collins
• Simon & Schuster
• Macmillan
• Hachette
• Penguin Random House

These five publishers make up over 90% of hardback book sales in the US and over 80% of paperbacks sold.

What Is The Most Prestigious Book Publisher?

In terms of the most established book publisher, Cambridge University Press, dating back to 1534. But in terms of revenue, iPenguin Random House generated revenues of 3.8 billion euros in 2020, up from 3.63 in the previous year.

Which Publisher Is Best For First Time Authors?

The best thing a first time author can do is find a great literary agent that specialises in whatever genre they write. Through that agent they will then have access to the very best publishers. Without an agent, you can't get near the Big 5!

How Do You Pick A Publisher?

To have access to the top publishers you need a literary agent, and they will know who to approach. But if you want to approach smaller publishers without an agent, or just curious as to who you'd like publishing your book, then simply take a look at books that are similar to the one you have written and see who publishes them.

Indie and traditional
Basic | Intermediate | Advanced

Launching a book is the most exciting moment in an author’s journey, but it’s also the scariest. You only really appreciate the sheer scale of the competition facing you when you’re getting ready to launch your book into the world.

And launch is confusing too. There are so many strategies out there, but which one is right for you? You can easily feel that you have to do everything – which is impossible – so you end up feeling like a failure before you even start.

So let’s make things clear and simple. We’re going to show you four strategies for how to plan a book launch. They are:

• New author (first book launch)
• Intermediate author (third book launch)
• Advanced author (tenth book launch, let’s say)
• Traditionally published author

Obviously, these strategies are guidelines only. If you have specific assets (a well-listened to podcast, for example), then you’re going to make use of them in cross-promoting, no matter where you are in your publishing journey.

Likewise, you have skills and preferences and those need to play a part too. If you just hate tech, you probably aren’t going to get heavily involved in advertising. If you’re great on social media, you’re going to want to be active there. And so on.

In short, what follows is a set of guidelines for you to adapt around who you are. If you don’t follow one exact recipe in what follows, that’s not you being dumb. That’s you intelligently adapting an approach around your specific needs.

Oh, and yes, I know you want to plunge straight in here, but don’t.

The single thing which will most determine the success or failure of your book is the quality of your preparation.

If you’re so impatient to get to launch that you’ve rushed your cover, or your text, or any of the other essentials, you’ll simply be leaving a big fat heap of money on the table for someone else to pick up.

Think of launch as a bucket where you are trying to scoop up as many readers, fans, sales and reviews as possible. If you don’t make damn sure that bucket is sealed and watertight before you start, you are going to leak readers like crazy. You can work like seven devils and still not be rewarded for all your effort.

So before we get to your launch plans, we’re going to run you through a checklist. If you’re solid on all those bullet points, then please proceed to launch. If you’re wobbly on some of the checklist items, then fix those things before doing anything else.

Preparation: it’s boring, but it matters.

Your Book Launch Checklist

So you have an upcoming book, and you feel ready to launch it into the world. Here’s your checklist, organised in rough order of priority.

The Essentials

This first set of bullets are things that you just can’t compromise on. Yes, you can theoretically publish a book if you haven’t done these things, but you can’t do it well. So for a successful book launch, don’t skimp.

• Completed text.
• Professional editorial review. I’ve put this in italics, just because Jericho Writers offers a very high quality editorial service and we have an obvious interest in boosting editorial services. But I’ve been a pro author for twenty years, and I’ve never once launched a book without a third party editorial review. And you know what? My books have always got better. So: yes, I’m biased. And yes, editorial help makes a difference.
• Copy editing / proofreading. Same thing here. You will need help with copyediting, unless you want your book to go out into the world strewn with errors. We also offer copyediting help but honestly? This is an area where you can save money. If you’re friends with an English teacher, or librarian, or anyone else you trust to read a text very closely and pick up errors, then go with that. You DO need a second set of eyes to review your text. You SHOULD save money here if you can. A few errors won’t hurt anyone.
• Quality cover. Don’t skimp. Get this right. If you only 95% like the design you have, then go on until you’re at 100%. The first cover you ever make will be the most expensive, because that’s where you’re evolving the strategy for the entire series. Once you have the basic template, your future covers will be easy. But get this right.
• Amazon book description. Get this right.
• Categories and keywords. Get this right: an hour or two’s work upfront will pay dividends for literally years to come.
• Front matter. This is the “Look Inside” portion of your e-book. This is where you convert the curious browser into the brand-new reader. So make sure that the front part of your e-book helps that conversion process. You need to be clear about what your book is, and why someone should read it.
• End matter. This is so crucial. The platform for all your future launches is the readers you collect from this one. And the place to collect those readers? Is right after they’ve finished your book and are still in a state of focused excitement about it. In particular, the back of your book is the place where you need to (A) offer a free download and (B) solicit reviews.
• Free download offer. You need to offer your core readers a freebie. The basic offer is, “Hey, do you want a free story / video explainer / set of cheat sheets / anything else?” Not all readers will engage with that offer, but your best readers WILL engage … and you’ll get their email address … and that email list will form the basis of everything else you do.
• Email collection system. You can’t just offer people a free story (or other incentive). You also have to deliver it. That is going to mean you have an author website with the right technology on it, or you are going to use a third party service (like the ever-excellent Bookfunnel) to collect the email address and deliver the book.
• Email service provider. You need to be signed up with a Mailchimp or ConvertKit, or some similar company. Those guys are going to collect emails for you, automate emails, send emails, and everything else.

If you need more help with any of this, you probably want our monster self-publishing guide, which you can view for free here.

If you need more than that (and you probably do), we have an exceptionally good self-publishing video course. That course is expensive to buy – because it’s really, really good – so don’t buy it. That course, plus a ton of other incredibly good stuff, is available FREE to members of Jericho Writers. And if you’re serious about your writing, we’d love to welcome you as a member. You can find out more about us and how to become a member right here.

The Nice-To-Haves

What follows are things that you may well already have in place, or think you absolutely need. Advanced authors are likely to tick every one of these boxes. For newer authors – well, you can’t do absolutely everything all in a single go. So don’t panic.

• Facebook author page. You need to make sure that your profile picture is 100% consistent with your book cover visuals. You need to add content at least weekly and – this is the important bit – that your content is very narrowly focused on your ideal reader. So if you are writing non-fiction about training dogs, then your Facebook page should be very narrowly focused on that topic, and nothing else. If you have to choose between 100 passionate fans and 1000 people half of whom are there for the freebies or the cute puppy pictures, then choose the 100 every time. The “not all that interested” brigade will ruin your engagement metrics and blur your audience definition. Focus matters. Scale doesn’t – or not nearly so much.
• Amazon Author Central page. It’s an easy win this one, so you probably want to take care of it. Basically: Amazon lets you build your own author profile on their system. Will it sell books for you? Not really. Maybe a few.
• Author website with blog. You'll notice that I DO think you need an email collection system that works, and for most authors the actual story-for-email exchange will be done on their website. But that’s by far the most important element of any author site. If you also want to blog, then do, but it’s no big deal. If you blog, then see what I’ve said above about the Facebook author page. Narrow focus is much, much more important than just grabbing random sets of eyeballs.
• Facebook tracking pixel. If you want to use some more advanced ad techniques on Facebook, then you’ll want a tracking pixel on your site, so Facebook (in its incredibly creepy way) can watch when its users visit your site. Even if you don’t use that data now, you probably want to start collecting it, so Facebook can start populating its creepy databases.
• Twitter. Oh heck. Some people love Twitter. If you do, then you’re already on it. If you’re not, well, maybe you don’t want to be. I don’t think it sells books, so don’t worry.

The “Why Bother?” List

Somethings that people say you ought to do, you don’t need to do. Including:

• Your Goodreads profile
• Printing flyers / postcards
• Press releases
• A launch party. I mean that’s fun, and you should probably have one. But you should have one because it’s fun celebrating with your friends. It’s not a serious book launch technique.
• Book trailer. Not much point here, unless you have a significant TikTok audience, or similar.
• Giveaways, unless these are very carefully targeted.

OK. Checklist all done and dusted? Then let’s move onto three book launch plans, graded according to author experience. We start easy, and build from there.

A Book Launch Plan For The First Time Author

This is your first book launch. And your first job is to set your expectations appropriately.

You will not make much money from this book. You will not reach many readers. You will not get many reviews. You will probably lose money, if you take into account all your upfront costs.

All the same, this book launch really matters. This first-of-series book is going to be your little ambassador to the Big Wide World. It’s where the majority of all your series readers ever are going to start. So the quality of the book matters. Ditto the number and quality of reviews. The quality of your cover and book description. And so on.

Here’s your book marketing plan.

1. Price

This is your first book and nobody knows you. So this is like one of those little bits of cheese they give you as tasters, when they want you to buy the whole damn cheese. It’s free to nibble, but you pay to gorge. In short: price your book free or at £0.99/$0.99. Or yo-yo between those two price points. Or kick the price up to £4.99/$4.99, so when you slash the price to free, it looks like a great offer to readers.

At this stage, you’re not looking to make revenue. You’re looking to:

1. Build reviews
2. Populate your Also Boughts with the right type of readers (more on that in a second)
3. Collect emails for your mailing list

If you tick those three boxes in a satisfactory way, don’t worry too much if your revenue is small to negligible. You are building a platform for the future.

2. Ask For Reviews

At the end of your book, include a note to the reader that you would love them to review your book. Tell them how to do it and say how much it means to you personally. Those direct appeals really help secure reviews.

Oh, and it probably goes without saying that you should never buy reviews or anything of that sort. Amazon will sniff those things out and send an army of tiny robots to invade your bloodstream and turn your skin yellow.

3. Offer A Free Download

We sort of covered this in the checklist material, but it’s so important I’m going to say it again.

You need to offer your readers a free download. They get a story (or video, or cheat sheet, or whatever). You get their email address and permission to contact them.

This is the rock that stands at the heart of everything else you ever do. Don’t neglect it. Get the details right. You have to make this part work.

4. Friends And Family

It’s fine to ask your friends and family to buy your book and leave an honest review, BUT only ask those people who actually like and regularly read your specific genre. If your mother only ever readers slasher-zombie-horror books and you only write Sweet Romance, then her purchase of your romance book will be an active negative.

How come? Because Amazon needs to understand who the readers of your book are, and if you start, in effect, saying to Amazon “this Sweet Romance book will be enjoyed by readers of Slasher-Zombie-Horror” then Amazon won’t know how to market your book.

Key lesson: A bad sale is worse than no sale at all. Don’t be tempted.

5. Hit Your Email List (If You Have One)

Let’s say you’ve already released a free novella via, for example, Instafreebie. That release will give you a list of email addresses. You can and should go to those people and say, “hey, I’d love you to buy my book [or get the free download]. But in particular, I’d really love it if you left a review for me on Amazon. I’m just starting out in my career and those reviews are invaluable for me – and they’re so helpful to other readers too. Thanks so much.”

6. Go Narrow

Don’t be tempted by Apple and all those other book stores. You are better off going all in on Amazon. Yes, you lose the (pretty meagre) sales available from Apple and co, but in return you gain access to Kindle Unlimited readers, who may easily make up 50% of your income, or even more.

This isn’t even a marginal decision, to be honest with you. When you have 3+ books out and are making $10,000+ in sales revenue, then maybe you have a decision to make. But starting out? Go narrow. You’ll do far better.

7. Don’t Go For Pre-orders

Pre-orders stink.

Why would you want to drive traffic to an Amazon page that has zero reviews and which doesn’t actually let readers get a book on their devices right now this second?

Answer: you wouldn’t. So launch naked. No pre-orders at all, please.

(And yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but if you are a newbie, then you’re not one of them.)

8. AMS Adverts

AMS – Amazon Marketing Services, Amazon’s own in-house ad-platform – is a great but frustrating ad platform.

It’s great, because it’s easy to build ads that convert well and make money. It’s frustrating because the interface is dire and because the ads are really hard to scale. (Unlike on Facebook, where you just have to throw more money at the service.)

But still: AMS ads are great for new authors, because they’re cheap and because the sales and reviews will mount up over time.

(Also, and this post is in part an overview for what works at the moment, Amazon will surely give AMS a much-needed overhaul as currently, the interface is just embarrassingly bad.)

9. Free / Discounted Book Sites

There are sites like Robin Reads, ENT, Freebooksy and others that build large databases of readers interested in free or discounted titles. Those lists are segmented by genre, so if you write Space Opera you won’t be bothering people who only love Cosy Mystery.

You definitely want to drop some money on those sites. Get your book right in front of people specifically looking for titles like yours. And yes, those email lists go to discount hounds, but a lot of those discount hounds are looking for a new series to commit to and enjoy, so they want their “taster” experience to be free (or low cost). Thereafter they’ll be happy to pay full e-book prices.

Oh yes, and while Bookbub is the biggest discounted book site by a mile, you are extremely unlikely to get access to it at this stage in your career. So start smaller and build up.

Expert tip: you probably want to stack promotions if you can. It’s better to drop $300 over several promo sites at the exact same time, than to pay the same money in split promotions. Especially on Amazon, big, bold promos work better than multiple small ones.

Expert tip II: Use the great Nicholas Erik for an always up-to-date guide of which book sites are great and which ones are just meh. Get his insights here.

10. Blog Tours, Etc

I’ve listed this last on the checklist, because I think it’s optional. I don’t think you get a lot of readers from blog tours, soliciting reviews from bloggers, etc.

But – this is your first book. Maybe you just want to get out there and you will get some readers, and those readers are gold dust for you at this stage. So if you want to go for it, go chase around some bloggers in your niche. If you can’t be bothered, then don’t bother – and don’t feel guilty either.

Is all this doing your head in? I’m not surprised. There’s a lot to take in and it can seem overwhelming. The solution for most people will be to take a really good step-by-step course that just walks you through the entire process.

We have just such a course – here – and it’s superb. Inspirational, practical, and lavishly documented. Trouble is, our course, like all the other good uns on the market, is really expensive. So don’t buy it. That course, and a ton of other good stuff, is available totally free to members of Jericho Writers. If you’re serious about your writing & your publishing, then we’d love to have you join us. All the info you need is right here. We look forward to meeting you!

A Book Launch Plan For The Intermediate Author

This is maybe your third or fourth book launch. Some of the strategies above are either second nature to you now, or they’ve dropped away completely. (Approaching friends and family is mostly a first-book-only thing. Ditto blog tours and the like.)

So for your third or fourth book launch, you’re going to use all of the above strategies – where they make sense – and then add / elaborate as follows:

1. Sophisticated Use Of Email Lists

With our first book launch, we just thumped out a “buy my book now” email to the few names we had on our list, and we got what we got.

OK, but that was then. Now we have a stronger list, and we can play things a little more cleverly. Because here’s the thing:

• Amazon likes email-driven sales surges (and drives your book high up the bestseller charts as a result).
• Amazon LOVES strong and steady sales surges, especially those that continue over four or (play safe) five days.

So, assuming that we have a decently performing list of, let’s say, 2,000 names or more, we’re not just going to bang out a “buy my book” email on the day of launch. Instead, we’re going to divide that list into three or four roughly equal slices, and launch emails on day #1, day #2, day #3, with reminder emails to non-openers on days #3, #4, and #5. (Or something like that. The principle is more important than the exact way you choose to implement it.)

The resulting steady pattern of sales will signal to Amazon that this book isn’t a one-day wonder. There’s real selling strength behind it. That signal will prompt Amazon to work harder, and for longer, than it otherwise would.

This simple, free email strategy remains the most powerful single strategy at your disposal. If you do this well, and little else, you can still achieve great things.

2. Get Reviews From Your Best Readers

Once you are developing your email list nicely, you can go to your best readers and offer them an Advance Review Copy of your forthcoming book, in exchange for a review once they’ve read it. You’re not asking them for fake reviews. You want honest verdicts. But crucially, you want anyone with an ARC to post their review within 48 hours of your book being launched. That’s the part that really, really matters.

How come? Because with all your activity around launch, the visibility of your new title will never be as high as this again (give or take a huge Bookbub promo, perhaps.) That visibility means that a ton of totally new readers will be finding your work for the first time. And that means, you want to populate your page with reviews as soon as humanly possible. Waiting 30-60 days for the reviews to populate organically will slaughter your conversions at the time when your Amazon book page has its maximum levels of traffic.

So get your readers engaged early. And feel free to nudge them. Get the reviews, and get them fast!

3. Series Listings In Your End-matter

The best place to sell your e-books? Your other e-books.

As you start to build out your list, make sure you go back to the e-books you already have out on sale and list all your titles. Make sure that you include the series number and a very short blurb (50-100 words is plenty) for each book. You also, of course, need to include purchase links for each book with link text that’s more tentative (“Find out more”) than pushy (“Buy now!”).

4. Remarketing Ads On Facebook And Google

Both Facebook and Google let you “remarket” to your “almost-but-not-quite” customers.

So Google allows you to push ads at people have who have recently visited your website. Facebook does the same, but also lets you market to specific audience groups – for example, people on your mailing list, or people who didn’t open and click your launch email.

Because these ads are going to a very warm audience, they tend to have an excellent conversion rate, with good CTRs and low CPCs.

Even so, before you start to advertise with any kind of meaningful budget, you do need to test carefully to get the right creative. It remains a lot easier to waste money with ads than it is to make it. Take care!

5. Series-level Promos

Now that you have a series of books to play with, you can get a bit more creative with the way you structure your promos. You should no longer think about promoting a book, but about the series. So if you’re launching #3 in your series, you might want to arrange things like this:

• Book #1. Free promo. Use Freebooksy, ENT, and other sites to promote the freebie. Make sure you stack promos to deliver downloads in the necessary volumes.
• Book #2. Use a Kindle Countdown deal to earn 70% royalties at £0.99/$0.99. Maybe use some of the other promo sites to support this offer. Maybe try some remarketing ads, using a carousel to display all three of the products you have for sale.
• Book #3. Launch, launch, launch! This is where you’re going to spend most of your firepower.

You’ll use your email list to support the launch, of course, but you’ll probably want to draw attention to the other offers too. The more your whole series increases its visibility in Amazon, the more new readers will pour into your series as a whole, with all the lovely readthrough sales you’ll collect over the long term.

6. Think Kindle Unlimited

If you’re still intermediate in terms of sales and list, then you should stick with Kindle Unlimited. It’ll simplify your life, and make you more money.

But you also need to have a KU mindset, because the way you make money on Apple/Kobo/etc is different from the way you’ll earn money on KU. The essence of effective Kindle Unlimited marketing is simple. You want to achieve big bursts of visibility. As much visibility as possible, extended over a minimum of four days, but ideally for a week or even more.

That extended big-burst visibility will earn you money for weeks and weeks. You’ll see a surge in page reads that dies off slowly rather than fast. Granular, drip-drip-drip marketing techniques cannot achieve this effect. On this model, you’d do much better to have a big budget, 0% ROI promotion that really lifts visibility, than to have a couple of nicely performing little campaigns that achieve decent ROI but don’t really impact visibility.

With the first lesson of our brand new Premium Member course Introduction to Self-Editing launching this week, I thought I'd share my own editing process with you. I honestly don’t know how much it helps to understand another writer’s process. What matters to you isn’t how I write best, but how you do. There’s not one way to play this game, there are a million. But if you’re interested, and in the hope that it helps, here’s how I edit. 

The first thing to say is that, in my case, there’s no real distinction between my writing and my editing. I self-correct all the time as I write. My paragraphs are very often short, but if I write a reasonably meaty three or four sentence paragraph, I’ll almost always tweak it and nudge it into shape before moving onto the next. Indeed, I quite often edit a sentence before I’ve even hit the final full stop. 

Why so twitchy? Well, a few things. I’m a natural fidget. I’m not at the threshold for ADHD, but I’m certainly that way inclined. But also, I’m like my wife. She can’t quite be content in a messy or ugly room. She’ll always seek to remedy what can be remedied before she can really make herself comfortable and turn to whatever it is that brought her there. 

Same with me and bad sentences. Asking me to write new text when there’s messy text just behind me? It doesn’t work. The nagging distraction of that baggy sentence, that poorly chosen word, will stop me fully attending to whatever’s next. 

Here’s the start of an upcoming Fiona novel: 

Imagine this. 

A cold night. A scatter of snow. Not much, but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour. 

The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it. 

In the street: no cars moving. Almost none parked, if it comes to that. On this street, the cars – the BMWs and the Mercs, the Range Rovers and the Teslas – are sheltered behind walls, in garages, protected by the red blinks of security alarms. 

And a white van, its lights off. 

And two people moving. Not quiet, but not loud. Not furtive, but efficient. Dressed dark, dressed warm. Which, in this weather, is also a way to say that their shapes and faces are lost, muffled, disguised. 

That’s how the text looks now. It’ll change again before publication, but nothing there really annoys me. 

Here’s my editing journey to get there: 

Imagine this. 

A cold night. A scatter of snow. 

These words went down first thing and I haven’t changed them. The first two words are critical: it’s not normal Fiona-speak – she doesn’t normally address the reader in any way – but they matter here for a reason which will become clear much, much later. 

The cold / scatter of snow details are – for me – nice and easy: that way of giving physical detail is an established part of the Fiona voice. I like it because the voice is clear and well-differentiated, but I also love it because it’s so compact. For those writers who are still slave to the “Gotta have a main verb” dictum, the same seven words would have come out a bit like this: 

It was a cold night, with a scatter of snow on the ground. 

To my mind, all the additional words there are essentially dull and add nothing. So if I were a slave-to-the-verb kind of writer, I’d have added juice. Something like this: 

The night was cold, with a light scatter of snow hardening beneath the frost. 

And, OK, I like that more, except I’m always bothered by the word ‘with’ in this context – it’s just a lazy way to add bolt detail onto an existing unit. So I’d probably have replaced the ‘with’, by writing: 

The night was cold and an earlier scatter of snow now hardened beneath the frost. 

I’d be pretty much happy with that now – ‘hardened’ feels more active and, literally, harder than ‘hardening’ – but as I say, my Fiona-voice just skips over all that hoopla, and delivers all the information in two sentence fragments boasting a combined 7 words. 

Then we got to this bit: 

Not much [snow], but there’s a fierce frost, so the hard surfaces around here – paving stones, gravel, brick walls, iron gates – are glazed with diamonds. No leaves left on the trees, or not many, but the tree trunks have an iced glitter, as though constructing some new armour. 

I had to pick away at that bit to get it into shape. An earlier version used the word ‘frost’ twice and I kept wanting to glaze things. 

The leaves on trees bit is sort of dull, except that the reader has no idea yet of time of year, so this was my way of telling the reader that we were in November, not January. 

The list of hard surfaces – paving stones and the rest – is also dull, but it’s dull in a quiet suburban way, which is just right for the location. I do not love the ‘around here’ phrase. Where else would the hard surfaces be? So those two words need to go: an edit that still needs to happen. 

I like the ‘some new armour’ image: that’s true to Fiona’s voice, but it also delivers a sense of battle-readiness. 

The next paragraph also needed some tweaking and plucking: 

The light? Not much. A little moon naked under scraps of cloud. Streetlamps shining their joyless yellow. The colour of the last rags of autumn, but dimmer. More suppressed. Draining colour, not revealing it. 

Again, the first two sentence fragments (four words in total) just went down on the page and stayed there. The moon and cloud stuff is quite like me – I’ve probably used something like that phrase before – but I’m happy with it. Should it be a little moon or not? I don’t quite know, but it’s going to stay little for now. 

Also (I’m only just noticing now; I don’t observe these things as I write) I especially like it that we have these themes of battle and vulnerability emerging from the text. Although we’re really just describing a theme, we already have a hint of battle (armour), a hint of vulnerability (a naked moon) and references to draining colour – a disguise, not a revelation. All this means that the description has a kind of sprung quality. Nothing dark has happened yet, but you already know this is a crime novel, not a romance. 

Then I had to tinker quite a lot to get the next bit right. I want to paint the colour of a suburban street, with a little snow on the ground, not much of a moon, and sodium-type street lighting. I could just say ‘The street is it by yellowy-orange sodium lights’ or something like that. But the point isn’t really the colour, is it? It’s the feeling. And what is the feeling? Well, that’s the bit I had to struggle to get to. 

What I’ve ended up with combines joyless, rags, dim, suppressed and draining colour. Listed out like that, it feels alarmingly single-note, but I think it works OK on the page. In effect, we start out with a colour description (‘joyless yellow’) then work through a chain of thought to figure out that what’s really happening here is an emptying out of colour, not any kind of addition. 

Oh yes, and some editors would worry about the repetition of the word ‘colour’, but I’m not fussed. The repetition doesn’t feel accidental or obtrusive, so it’s fine with me. 

And so on. 

The two people in the white van dump a corpse in one of these wealthy suburban gardens and then vanish. The book is about the investigation and shenanigans that follow. The chapter doesn’t quite say ‘they dump a corpse’, but it gets reasonably close… and this is a crime novel, so readers assume (correctly) that murder is going to be on the agenda. 

All this is how my editing process runs, always. It often starts before I hit a full-stop. It usually starts before I reach the end of a paragraph. It is very pedantic. It cares about two unnecessary words or a not-quite-perfect word choice. 

It’s utterly hard-wired and instinctive. The act of writing and the act of editing are so conjoined, I don’t really think of them as separate. 

I don’t consult a style manual for these edits. In the end, what drives me is a sense of dissatisfaction with bad text and happiness with good text. My whole writing-editing journey is just about making 1,000,000 tiny choices that move me from a mostly-grumpy place to a largely-happy one.

Next week, I’ll talk a bit about my more macro-edits. Till then, I have the moon to worry about. Little, or not little? Hmm… 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

For the next few weeks, instead of posting into the Feedback Friday forum, I want you to post into the Introduction To Self-Editing forum. Remember, to log in first. The task I set each week will correlate with what Debi Alper teaches in that week's lesson, so if you're not a Premium Member yet and want to get the video teaching that goes along with the task, you can join here, or purchase the course as a one-off here.

This week's assignment from the course:

Share a plot summary (can be written out as a synopsis or just with bullet points) in the forum. Point out where you think tweaks to structure, plot, and pace might be required, and see if others agree.

Til soon. 

Harry

This month, we’re talking editing. Indeed, if you’re a Premium Member, I very much hope you’ll trot along to my live-editing workshop this coming Tuesday. (Log in and find details here. Not a member? Join us today.)

And I want to start the month with a short but important message. It’s one you already know, yes, but it’s a point we can all easily lose.

It’s this:

Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.

That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.

If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, 'Yes, I just built that.'

If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)

And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:

1. Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.
2. Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.

So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)

And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.

The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.

The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.

The ladder from rubbish to excellent is Editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a Manuscript Assessment from us – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments.

So. Write, edit, publish, repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

We’ll get back to text-analysis next week, but this week, let’s just throw it open. Do you struggle with something like Impostor Syndrome? How do you solve it? Just open up about the issue; you’ll get a LOT of understanding, and you might find suggestions that help. Come and fake it till you make it here.

***

And look: in my defence, I did clean the chimney, and perfectly well. But some idiots had removed most of the flue, so the more I cleaned the chimney, the more the debris fell into a big pile of dry material that I couldn’t access, or see, or have any reason to believe existed. Two or three sparks and – fire. The kids arranged chairs as though for a pop-up cinema and watched the entire show with glee.

Til soon.

Harry

Rachel Davidson, long-time Jericho Writers Premium Member and now a part of our Writer Support team, is currently studying on the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. She’s agreed to share her experience of the course with us month by month.

First up: a look at how she made the decision to invest in her writing – and believe in herself...  

Hey there – thanks for popping by. Let me introduce myself. I have been a Premium Member with Jericho Writers for many years. I’d give you the precise number, if only I could remember! Suffice to say, Jericho Writers has consistently walked beside me as I traverse the writerly landscape. 

More recent times have seen me joining the Jericho Writers team, in Writer Support – which means that for three days a week, I get paid to think about writing, talk about writing and help other writers with their writing. I love it! 

And now there’s another big tick on my to-do list. I’ve been accepted onto the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. The first month’s topic is Planning and Plotting. Well, I’ve been planning and plotting this since the earliest of days. Let me go back to the beginning and tell you my story... 

I’ve wanted to be an author since primary school, where I discovered the wonder of writing stories. More than this, I discovered the joy of my stories being read. My teacher was a fan of the tales I wrote: a series of Nancy Drew-esque mysteries which my identical-twin characters solved with surprising ease. He was a kind teacher. I was awarded the English Literature Cup at our final ‘graduating’ assembly. Destiny set. I was going to be an author. 

Turn the page to the next chapter – the scene is my first secondary school English lesson. I am having my tall poppy head sliced off. I have no memory of what was actually said: can’t even remember the teacher’s name, or what she looked like. I do remember the crushing reset. How foolish, to think I could be a writer! My efforts were lacking. I did not measure up. Just who did I think I was? She had pointed at the part of me that thought I couldn’t and said: “You’re right.” 

It took me thirty years to get back to my dream.  

It took me falling in love.  

One day, my new husband asked: “Who do you think you are? Who do you really want to be?”  

“An author, please?” I replied. 

“Please?”  

He frowned, then pointed at the part of me that thought I could, and said, “You’re right.”  

That was ten years ago. Since then, I have written five full novel-scale manuscripts and have started my sixth. I self-published the first three and proved a boatload and more to myself. I could write books which did sell, and that people enjoyed reading. I decided to change genre and aim to be traditionally published – and this is the track I’m on today.  

My fourth manuscript garnered one competition long-listing and sixty-three agent rejections. My fifth manuscript earned a long-listing in another competition and is currently collecting its own set of rejection-gongs. It hurts. It’s okay. It’s the process. I’m older. I know better now to keep going, and why it is important to do so: because my heart and its contents matter. 

That moment of permission from my husband was my inciting incident – and the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme is perhaps my mid-point. Could this be the moment at which everything will change and there’ll be no going back? It’s a big investment in my dream of becoming the best novelist I am capable of being. I want to hone my craft and grab the opportunities the course provides. I want to be proud of my writing: confident that I’m on my way to being an accomplished – perhaps even a great – storyteller.  

There are going to be a few more ups and downs in this plot line of mine. A crisis (or two) is to be expected. Moving between the first, second and third acts always involves some level of hanging off cliffs, yes?  

Ultimately, I’m hoping this is a redemption story – that a happy ending looms in the future for me. If I end up attracting the attention of an agent or publisher – or if I don’t – I am giving myself permission to find out what I can achieve. I’m plotting and I’m planning. I’m defining character and honing my voice. 

So, who do I think I am? I’m an author – learning to fully inhabit the role. Perhaps you’ll let me share my progress and experiences with you, as I work through the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme?  

I hope so.  

See you next time, 

Rachel 

Rachel Davidson is a long-term Premium Member of Jericho Writers prior to joining our Writer Support Team, Rachel loves helping hopeful writers, such as herself, to solve their problems and take a step or two closer to achieving their writing dreams. Rachel has previously self-published a trilogy, the first of which achieved bestseller status in fourteen Amazon categories in the UK, US, Australia and Canada and is now seeking her traditional publishing debut with her latest manuscript. You can find out more about Rachel via her Instagram @RachelDavidsonAuthor.

OK, battle of the clichés. Which is truer: “You can’t judge a book by its cover” or “A picture is worth a 1000 words”?

Well, please pick your preferred platitude – but when it comes to book marketing, then the thousand-words cliché beats the can’t-judge cliché into a cocked hat. A cocked hat with gold frogging and a generously sized rosette.

The fact is that, whether a reader is looking on Amazon or on a bookstore table, they start with only two really key bits of data. (I’m assuming, of course, that you don’t happen to have a name like Margaret Atwood or Dan Brown. If you do, I’d say that potential readers have three key bits of data, and the name wins out.)

The two bits of data are:

1. The book cover image

2. The title.

There may be shoutlines or puffs or subtitles on the cover too, but a reader doesn’t really grapple with those until they’ve assessed the first two items. And the hand doesn’t reach for the book, the cursor doesn’t move in for the click, unless those two things intrigue the target reader enough.

So how do you get the click? That is, probably, the most single important moment in the entire marketing chain.

This is a complicated question and every book and every situation is different, but my guidelines would be as follows:

Communicate genre

Take a look at these two images: 

Which is better? The first is the current book cover, the second one is from the movie DVD. Assume that the book is newly launched and can’t yet sell itself on name and reputation alone.

And the answer, surely, is that the actual book cover does a very poor job. The book is a dystopian fantasy involving an all-action teenage heroine. The readers you want to attract are young adults who want a dystopian fantasy featuring an all-action teenage heroine. The first image is … what? A historical novel? A lament for vanishing wildlife? A literary meditation of some sort? It’s entirely unclear. (That’s not a criticism of the 2025 cover, though. The book has become iconic, so it can afford a purely iconic cover.)

The DVD cover on the other hand does everything it needs to do. Dystopian? Yep. Fantasy? Well, probably, because most contemporary teenage girls don’t mess around with flaming arrows. Tough teenage heroine? Uh, yes. And the font says “speculative / future-set” not “Roman / classical / literary / boring.”

So, that’s your cover’s first job. Communicate genre. Establish an immediate link with the reader you’re targeting.

Communicate niche

Within any genre, there are any number of sub-genres. Cosy crime has a different vibe and a different readership from mainstream police procedurals… and both of those feel very different from gangland, mobster-type crime.

Your cover needs to find the niche within the niche. Your target reader needs to become curious with her very first glance.

Ignore your book

OK, you don’t have to ignore what actually happens in your book, and if the image in the cover relates to the text itself, then so much the better. But the worst self-made covers I’ve seen all fall into the trap of trying to interpret, over-literally, the story and settings of the actual text.

Perhaps those covers would be satisfying to people who had already read the novel and understood the allusions. But this is a marketing tool! People don’t know what those allusions mean. The cover has to attract people in – not provide an after-dinner mint to people who have just enjoyed your offering.

Here’s a cover that has effectively nothing to do with the text of the book:

The book is – duh! – not about moths and windowpanes. But who cares? It’s beautiful. 

Layer your messages 

Clare’s book cover also nudges a further point. The title has an opportunity to convey a message (or messages) of some sort. The cover art gives you a second opportunity to do the same. 

So don’t repeat yourself! Set up an interesting reverberation between the two. 

Suppose that book cover had shown an open hand and a moth flying away – that would have repeated the message of the cover… and produced something utterly bland. 

As it is, the cover here says, “Trapped.” The title says, “Released”. What’s going on? It’s that sort of question which invites further investigation. That’s the question which makes you read the shoutline. (“A tragic accident. A past you can’t escape.”) 

In effect, the reader is being led along like this:

1. Beautiful image (of the right sort of mood) attracts the eye

2. The title and the image kind of fight each other, prompting curiosity

3. The shoutline (and the title, and the domestic image) confirms your hunch that this is a psych thriller and that there are interesting mysteries to explore

4. You pick up the book and turn it over. 

Step 2 – the layering of the messages – is absolutely crucial to the whole sequence. 

In effect, the title and the cover are dancing a tango – but in loose (“open”) embrace instead of close embrace. You feel the linkage, but you also feel a distance.           

The open question 

For the same kind of reason, the title / cover needs to invite a question. That’s why the classic romance cover (woman in big dress, man with very open shirt) invites derision. It’s so single note: a tune played with one finger. 

The best covers – even in the romance aisle, where readers are seeking a relatively simple happy ever after story – all play with two hands, a full range of notes. Books like these: 

Those covers are beautiful... they talk about romance and they intrigue. 

That book about summer yells about happy summer days – but then strongly suggests them ending. Huh? What happens to this happy, splashy couple? 

And a book offering a love story shouldn’t talk about endings, surely? So what’s going on with the pair in the Yulin Kuang novel? 

“Isabel and the Rogue” has a rather more typical romance title – naming both parties and suggesting the guy has some growing up to do – but the image subverts that. The yellow-dress woman looks very much in control. The nice chap sitting next to her looks very mannerly and not at all rogue-y. So what’s going on? The same title with an image that just repeats the ‘girl + rogue’ meme of the title would be killingly bad. 

In every case, it’s an open question which intrigues the reader and prompts exploration. I think it’s probably true that EVERY good cover creates that intrigue. 

Work at thumbnail size 

Whether you’re working with a trad publisher or whether you’re commissioning your own self-pub cover, you will find that your designer presents you with your cover image at the hugest scale the internet can deal with. Ideally, a designer would like you to view the cover at monster size in the comfort of your own home cinema. 

Which means that the first thing you should do is shrink that damn cover down to Amazon-thumbnail size and see if it still works. Every test I’ve suggested in this email needs to work at diddy-size as well as at full size. As a matter of fact, I always think it’s helpful to superimpose your draft cover on a screen grab of an Amazon search page to see if your cover holds up against the competition you will face.  

Make a fuss 

My last command is for you, not your book cover. 

And it’s this: I know you are a very nice person. You’re like the gentleman seated next to Isabel, very nicely mannered, always ready to pass a bun and apologise for any crumbs on the carpet. 

But if your cover is weak, say so, say so, say so. You have a pram, I hope? Throw toys out of it. Throw your sticky bun on the carpet. You wish to hurl, not throw? Then hurl away. Hurl hard.  

Do not accept a mediocre cover. I’ve done that too often in my career (publishers coax you into acceptance), but do not do it. 

Make a mess. Yell. Scream. Get yourself a decent cover. That’s easy to do if you’re self-publishing. Harder to do – but just as essential – if you’re trad-publishing. 

You can go back to being nice again afterwards. 

Feedback Friday is all on titles this week. Anyone can have a go. I’ll be around, offering feedback, but my feedback is only for Premium Members, so if you’re not a PM, you have a sad life ahead, unless you Do What Needs To Be Done. 

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

We’ll do titles this week. Tell us what your book is about in 2-3 sentences, and tell us the title you’ve chosen. If you have a subtitle or shoutline in mind, then tell us that too. 

We want to feel a ripple of intrigue – a question we need answered. 

Once you're ready, log in to Townhouse and share your work here.

*** 

Til soon,

Harry. 

Do you struggle to silence the voice in your head that asks: 'Who are you to call yourself a writer?' or 'Who d'you think you are, spending precious time on a project that's bound to go nowhere?' You're far from alone. All authors - published and unpublished - struggle to shut this voice up from time to time. Rosie Fiore is an editor, mentor, the author of eight novels and a tutor on both our Novel Writing Course and Ultimate Novel Writing Programme. Here, she shares her top tips for banishing impostor syndrome for good... 

How do you answer that dreaded question, “What do you do?”

“I’m an author.”

“I’m a writer.”

“I'm an aspiring writer.”

“I’m trying to write.”

“I write a bit in my spare time.”

It can be difficult to name ourselves as writers: to take pride in our work and our achievements and to keep our courage up. Writing is lonely and tough, and sometimes it’s hard to persuade yourself to keep going.

As a writer, I bear the scars of failure and indifference, and I’ve done my share of staring into the long dark night of the soul. I’ve also mentored hundreds of writers who face the fear every day. So, here are five things I tell them (and try to tell myself).

1. There is no magic threshold

What’s that insistent little voice in your head saying? Mine says things like: “Call yourself a writer? You haven’t published anything / finished anything / written anything good.”

When I started running, the same voice told me I couldn’t call myself a runner because I hadn’t run a marathon / half marathon / 10k, and I wasn’t very fast. I am here to tell you that this is nonsense, in both cases.

Of course I'm a runner, even though I am only running a slow few miles. And if you’re writing, you’re a writer.

You’re doing the work. It isn’t an exclusive club. You’re not aspiring, unpublished or trying. You’re a writer. Own it.

2. Get yourself some cheerleaders

Sometimes, your courage will fail you. You will look at the words on the page (or the lack thereof) and think that you can’t do this.

You will need someone else to tell you that you can. Maybe that will be your significant other / mum / child/ best friend. But if not, you need writing buddies - so find your people.

Join a writing group, in person or online. Do a course. Look on the Jericho Writers Townhouse. Other writers will cheer you on, and by supporting them in return you will learn and gain so much.

3. Back yourself

Oh, this one is difficult. I did a playwriting course once and the teacher, John Donnelly (a fantastic playwright), said these two words. “Back yourself.”

My mind instantly rebelled and that insistent little voice spoke up. “You’re rubbish,” it said. “Lazy, undisciplined, not very good. Why would anyone back you, least of all yourself?”

“How do you talk to yourself?” John asked, as if he could hear my inner voice. “Would you talk to anyone else like that? Don’t speak like that to the person you need most in the world.”

I have a tiny post-it by my desk now that says, “Back yourself.” And when the ugly voice surfaces, I try to remember to look at it.

4. Celebrate the small wins

Celebrate the big wins. Hell, celebrate ALL the wins.

You finished a draft? Take a walk in the park. You revised that tricky scene? Cup of tea and a biscuit. Someone asked for a full manuscript? Well, that’s worth a dinner with friends!

I have a special dance I perform every 10,000 words (my family loves it and doesn’t roll their eyes, honest!).

Don’t wait for some mythical future date when you achieve all your goals. Try to make every step of the process joyful.

5. Bum in chair, fingers on keyboard

If doubt creeps in, keep going. If you think it’s rubbish, keep going. If you want to scrap it all and give up, keep going.

Nothing silences that insistent, ugly inner voice like the clatter of typing.

And remember:

“People saying: “It can’t be done,” are always being interrupted by somebody doing it.” – Puck magazine, 1903.

You’ve probably heard the line “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” You’ve probably also heard it attributed to the humourist Mark Twain – although, ironically enough, that attribution is doubtful at best.  

But have you ever considered it as a piece of writing advice? It’s actually a tremendously helpful way of thinking about creative non-fiction and the way you have to wrestle reality onto the page. 

Here are five useful lessons (perhaps we could even call them truisms!) that the famous phrase suggests: 

1. Tell the truth 

The truth isn’t the only thing that matters – and shortly, we’ll look more closely at why that’s the case. However, it’s still vitally important in non-fiction.  

The best way to get readers to believe in you as a narrator is to make sure everything you say is credible. Check your facts. Verify your sources. Test your theories. Where you are doubtful, say so. Do not lie. Your book is pointless if it doesn’t feel trustworthy. 

2. Remember: you are telling a story 

Telling the truth doesn’t necessarily mean telling the whole truth. Your duty is to your reader – not to every single thing that happened.  

Just because something has lodged in your memory, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important. Always be thinking about what moves your writing forwards. What does your reader need to know to understand your narrative? What is less important?  

Also, what’s interesting? Remember, stories are meant to be fun to read. 

3. Remember that good dialogue on the page is not the same as real speech 

Think about how journalists write up quotations. They don’t give us all the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, the hesitations and repetitions of natural speech – but we don’t (usually!) think that this is a deception.  

It’s okay to make speech run more fluently and fluidly – as long as you stick to the essential meaning and import. 

4. Real people have real feelings 

These feelings can be hard to predict and easy to hurt. If you’re writing about real people, you have to be careful – both from the point of view of not getting sued, and in line with the demands of basic humanity.  

Think carefully before you put anyone into your book. Are you sure you need to include them? Are you sure they will remember things in the same way you do? Are you certain your portrayal is accurate? Is there a justification for disguising someone’s identity? 

5. The truth matters 

I know I’ve already (kind of) said this, but it’s worth repeating. It’s worth stressing that the stories you tell as a non-fiction writer are worth telling, in spite of all the potential difficulties of doing so.  

The truth counts. Today, yesterday, forever.  

Setting it down on the page might just be the most important thing you do. 

At Jericho Writers, Sam is a tutor on both the Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and the Novel Writing Course, and also offers one-to-one mentoring and editorial support. You may also like to check out the Introduction to Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction course.

I yap on a lot about novels in these emails: I’ve written plenty of novels; I like writing them; the vast majority of you guys are writing them too.

But I’ve also written non-fiction: Five books under my own name, but I’ve been quite involved in ghost-writing or similar with several others.

So: I like non-fiction too. And, within that, I like creative non-fiction: writing narratives that are essentially true, but using broadly the same set of literary techniques that a novelist brings into play.

I’m bringing this up now, because we have a new course available: a 6-part a 6-part video course on an Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction. The course is led by Sam Jordison, a writer himself, but also the founder of the quite brilliant Galley Beggar Press. The course is free to our lovely Premium Members, naturally, but you can buy it for £99 if you really want to. (But why would you want to? You can get everything in Premium Membership for £150.) More info here if you want it.

Of the memoirs I’ve worked with most closely, two come to mind.

The first is West End Girls – a memoir by Barbara Tate. She grew up before and during the War. She had a terrible, flibbertigibbet mother and was mostly brought up by a stonily cold, icily respectable grandmother. So she emerged into the world of post-war London, a young and now-independent adult who had never really experienced love.

And then – in 1948 – she met a glamorous, exotic, beautiful and warm woman, Faye, with whom she instantly bonded. Faye just happened to be one of the most hard-working and successful prostitutes working in Soho and she needed a maid. Barbara became that maid.

Barbara’s book tells the story of that friendship. The author was in her 80s when the book came to us. It was vastly long and discursive. It didn’t really know what story it was meant to be telling. With a younger author, we’d have simply given guidance and let her do the work. Given Barbara’s age, I essentially took on the work myself, cutting out the excess material and stitching the remaining parts back together.

Barbara had gone on from maid-ing in Soho to achieve plenty in her life, but when I told her that we’d sold her book for good money to a major publisher, she was thrilled. We sat in her sunny Ealing garden and she waved a cup at me and said, “Harry, this will be the crown of my life.”

That book went on to be a beautifully well-published bestseller.

Another book I especially remember was Please Don’t Make Me Go, a story with a lousy cover and a weedy title (both chosen by the publisher to line up with the Misery Memoir kitsch, then very much in vogue.)

The author, John Fenton, was a tough, smart man. His book was a brutal, brilliant account of his time in a young offenders’ institution – he’d been sent there, on the basis of no actual offence, by a dad who just wanted rid of him. The book ended with an astonishing climax: just as things were going to go very badly indeed for the young Fenton, he managed to break into the office of the man who ran the place and found material so compromising that the outcome flipped in an instant, from very bad to very good.

And? My conclusions from working with those books?

Simply that pretty much every technique that applies to a novel applies also to non-fiction, of the kind we’re talking about.

Dialogue? Yes, John and Barbara both wrote dialogue that could easily have lived in fiction.

Scene construction? Definitely the same.

Characterisation? Yes, of course.

And the structure of the story itself? Yes, yes, yes. That’s key. Both the books I’m thinking of had this astonishingly novelistic structure – and in both cases with endings that just linger in the mind.

Now, personally, I think it’s OK if non-fiction writers nudge their facts into shape a little. I don’t mean outright lie, but I do mean shape. Omit something if it occludes the structure you’re building? Skip over some things, bring others into much greater prominence? Yes to all that.

Build your story.

I do warmly recommend Sam’s course. (The guy is something of a publishing genius and it’s just brilliant that we can bring a bit of him to you.) But also:

The reason why I talk so much about novels in these emails is that pretty much everything I talk about applies to you non-fictioneers too.

Build your story. Write well. Have fun.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

If you’re writing creative non-fiction, then let’s have the opening page of your book, or any chunk that represents a kind of manifesto for the book people are about to read.

As soon as you're ready, log into Townhouse and post your work here.

And those who are completing the Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction course too, don't forget to complete the lesson assignments and share your work in the course forum.

If you’re not writing non-fiction, then you’ve got the week off. And a Happy Easter to you.

***

Til soon.

Harry

All agents have passions. At our Festival once – late at night and after plenty of wine – one agent started listing hers. I know there were sharks on her list and haunted houses, and child killers, and twins, and (I think) anything Victorian, and definitely mistaken identity, and… the list went on. Somewhere out there, a perfect novel exists for her with all those things in one beautifully weird melange.

But? Mostly agents want surprise. They want that sense of, ‘Gosh, I had no idea I’d want something like this, but now that it’s in front of me, I really, really do.’

Pitch

I wrote a week or two ago about how the ghost of an elevator pitch needs to glimmer in your query letter. And it does. The ingredients for a compelling story need to be present. The agent needs to feel that intrigue from the very start.

Because I plappered (my daughter’s chosen verb) about that recently, I’ll say no more now.

Good writing / instant authority

Agents say they want a distinctive voice; of course they do. But if you try to analyse what that really means, I think it comes down to this. Agents want to read the first page of a manuscript and just know that the writer is in perfect control – of their sentences, their characters, their story.

That control will, most of the time, come with a voice that sounds like that specific author, and nobody else – simply because you don’t normally get that level of control in over text, without putting your own personality into it.

But does John Grisham, say, really sound so distinctive? Or Stephen King? I’m not sure they do. They are masters of their craft, of course, but it’s not really their voice that you’d want to pick out.

So, I’d focus less on voice, and more on authority. Can a professional reader tell from the first page or two that you are in control, and that good things lie in wait? The answer needs to be yes.

A plausible story

Most agents will regard your synopsis as the least important part of your submission package – which is just as well, because synopses are tedious to write and tedious to read.

That said, synopses can be massive time savers. Let’s say I were a busy agent. I’ve read a query letter and I’m intrigued. I’ve read the opening page or two, and I feel the authority of the writing.

So now what? I read 200 pages, only to find that the story massively disappoints 2/3 of the way into the book? Or discover that the basic theme is simply not marketable?

Well, I should say that the clues given from the query letter and opening pages are generally more solid than that. Those authority-clues are powerful and they don’t often lie. But still. It takes four hours to read a book. It takes five minutes to read a synopsis.

So an agent will mostly want to sense-check that synopsis for the basic story shape. The question is essentially: does this feel like a novel? Could this story fill out an 80,000 word book?

An avenue to market

But also, through all of the above, any agent will be asking themselves the one key question that will determine their decision: can I imagine how a publisher would market this?

What kind of cover? What kind of pitch? What sales messaging to the putative retailer? What comparable books?

Now, for clarity, you don’t have to be a marketing expert and you don’t need to come up with solutions. Or rather: it may be an asset if you can supply those solutions, but it’s not really your job to do so. (And if you do want to do so, then do so with tact, ‘In the vein of recent bestsellers, such as Robin Banks’s The Greatest Heist and Lottie Lightfingers’ The Wallet That Wandered...’)

But the agent is a professional salesperson, and therefore also a marketing expert. They’re a saleswoman (or man) whose job is selling to editors. Those editors will then have the task of selling your manuscript to their team and then, if they’re successful, selling your book to retailers and, through them, to the public. In fact, the number of successful sales needed is significant:

• Sale #1: You to your agent
• Sale #2: Your agent to an editor
• Sale #3: Your editor to their acquisitions committee
• Sale #4: your publisher’s sales team to retailers
• Sale #5: Your publisher’s marketing team to the public.

Your agent knows your book only succeeds if all those lamps are shining green. It’s that sense of commercial potential which will, almost certainly, define the response you get back.

A line of green lamps

And for you to achieve that line of green lamps? Well, by the time you’ve written your book, you’re kind of stuck with it.

But the advice never really changes. It all comes down to:

1. Knowing your market. You need to be deeply involved, as a reader, in the market you want to end up writing for. That knowledge will insert itself into your text. It’ll ensure that you write for the market as it is today, not as you want it to be.
2. A great pitch. I hammer away at elevator pitch a lot, because that pitch is just crucial. A so-so written book with a great pitch? That’ll sell. Most really big bestsellers are moderately written but with great pitches. If your pitch is weak, even great writing may not save you.
3. Good or excellent writing. Great pitch + good, competent writing: that’ll work. Adequate pitch + genius levels of writing: that’ll work. Any sort of pitch + clumsy writing? That’s a fail, every time, as it jolly well ought to be.

But that’s what we’re here for, right? To help you get to the point of pitching to agents, or self-publishing, with confidence.

This thing that you want? It ain’t easy, but it is doable. And we’re here to help.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Another slightly left-field task this week. (Though I realise this is a sporting terminology, I don’t really understand. I mean, in cricket, we’d normally say leg-side, except that you’d need to say off-side if the batter was left-handed. And since bowlers bowl quite happily to left-handed and right-handed batters, there’s no big difference between a legside ball and an offside one. So left-field or right-field? I don’t get it.)

Anyway. Here’s a different sort of task.

1. Give me the pitch from your book, in any form you like (super-short / short / 2-3 sentences.)

2. Find two or three books which are recent, successful and comparable. Give me the pitches from at least one of them.

That’s an ouchy task: demanding to do. But if you can do it, and your book sits happily amidst your chosen company, then you have a marketable work on your hands.

As soon as you're ready, log into Townhouse and post your work here.

***

I’m writing this email on Tuesday. It’s my birthday today, one that I share with my wife.

The kids are being… not horrible. There is sunshine and there are tulips and much tea. Tulips are maybe my absolute favourite flower, except that I do have a soft spot for dog roses, and I’ve got enough of Wales in my blood that I am easily seduced by a daffodil.

And cherry blossom? Hmm. But I think tree-flowers need a different category, no?

Til soon,

Harry.

As you’d expect, there’s quite a lot of research into what makes people buy stuff. And, as you’d expect, writers are mostly very, very, very not interested in exploring it.

But that’s tough on you, because this email is going to tell you anyway. And yes, I know you want to write books and leave selling to someone else. But that’s not how it works. Even if you’re traditionally published, you’ll be asked to review blurbs, think about cover art, review social media yadda and email lists… and, if you self-publish, then you’ll be thinking about Facebook ads and the like as well.

You don’t have to turn into the sort of person who wears a black shirt, and a gold medallion, and fake tan so thick it looks like a kind of golden yogurt. But you do have to engage with how your book strikes people on first view, not just on full view.

And here are some tips. They’re all based on actual scientific research (hence the slightly weird precision in the data), so what follows isn’t just an opinion piece. That said, books are different from a lot of consumer products, so you have to adjust accordingly. (For those interested: here's where I got my data.)

Say you

Address the reader as though they’re in the room with you. Say, ‘you’. The result of that direct address is that people feel around 20% more involved in your brand. Since you’re really trying to build that direct relationship, that involvement matters.

Say I

And be you. Don’t depersonalise yourself. Not 'This story was written to thrill,’ but, 'I wanted to thrill you.' Keep the relationship front and centre.

The difference between 'I' and 'we' in a study was a sales improvement of around 7%. My guess? With a brand that ought to be focused on you as author, the positive results are probably greater than that. The author-reader relationship has the potential to be way stronger than (say) the toothpaste-manufacturer / tooth-owner relationship.

Here and now

For the same sort of reasons, don’t jump into the past. Keep any marketing-type copy in the present tense. The stats say that this helps it sound up to 26% more helpful / compelling. And you want to compel.

Be assertive

There are different ways of being assertive. You can make firm claims rather than wishy-washy ones. (So ‘all’ or ‘always’, not ‘mostly’ or ‘often’.)

Strong negatives also show assertiveness: 'you won’t read a better thriller this year' just sounds punchier than 'this will be one of the best thrillers you’ve read for a long time.'

The effect of this kind of language can boost engagement by up to 18%.

Avoid technical language

Yes, your book may be a near-future SF story about a moon-mission gone wrong. But keep your blurb clear, not cluttered. If you write 'When the landing craft hit the rim of a crater…', the reader knows instantly what you mean. If you write 'When the orbital descent vehicle foundered on the lip of an impact basin…', you’ve lost your zing.

I’m not talking here about the language inside the book – your book and your characters and your story will need to determine that. But don’t fail to get people through your entrance door. And that means, keeping it clear and keeping it simple.

If you do clutter up your language, sales drop by up to 16%. (And, honestly, in the context of books where the nearest competitive product is only a click away, I think sales will drop a lot more than that.)

The rule of three

An interesting one this, because at first sight it doesn’t apply to books. The rule is: list three benefits, not two, not four, not five.

Why? Well, three just beats any other number by 10.4%. It appears that three works because it establishes a pattern without seeming too fake.

Additionally, there’s evidence that says if you list three excellent benefits of X, and then also two good benefits, consumers take a kind of average score and think, ‘Yeah, not so excellent really.’ Sticking only with the excellent options means that consumers were willing to spend up to 37% more.

Now, you’re not offering a baking tin or a waterproof jacket. You’re offering a book, and the benefit of a book (assuming it’s fiction) is just that it’s good and will grip the reader. So maybe listing benefits doesn’t really apply.

Except that… Netflix uses the rule of three all the time. Take a quite excellent programme – Harry & Meghan, for example: it’ll be described with a trio of adjectives – Captivating / Investigative / Social-cultural.

I think the same applies to any time you try to intrigue a reader with your book. Take my Fiona books. If I used a trio of words, it might be something like ‘Intelligent, Intense, Suspenseful’. If I tried to layer things on top of that (‘Literate, dark, celtic noir, thought-provoking’), the pitch to the reader becomes so muddled as to be indecipherable.

And that rule of three applies even where you might not expect. Let’s say you’ve picked the adjectives and themes you want to push. Everything needs to point at those specific things.

So if you have a reader-review that chimes beautifully with the adjectives you’ve picked – then great, use it. But quite likely, you also have a reader-review that says something positive, but not aligned with your core themes. In that case, including the review is muddling the message. It’s leaving the reader uncertain about what you’re offering.

So pick your themes – three of them – and work those hard.

Syntactic surprise

And here’s an interesting (and more writer-y) piece of of advice:

According to research shared by Thomas McKinlay, simply using a surprising sentence pattern in your copy can help you get a 127.5% increase in click-through rates (CTR).

So here’s your expected sentence structure:

Red Bull will give you energy for hours.

Take a trip anywhere you feel like going.

Uber Eats can deliver a delicious meal to your door.

Boring, right? And here’s the same thing, made a little less expected:

Red Bull gives you wings

Belong anywhere. [AirBnB]

A delicious meal at your door, by Uber Eats.

There used to be a way to calculate ‘syntactic surprise’, but the online calculator tool seems dead. That’s a shame, but you’re a writer – you don’t need it. Making nice sentences is your thing, right?

And a 127% increase in click-through rate? Wow. That’s the difference between an Amazon bestseller and one that’s nigh on impossible to market profitably.

Use these tools. Use them well. Be happy.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Ooh, a challenging task this week. It comes in two pieces:

1. Give me an Amazon book description of 150 words or less.
2. Give me a ‘shout line’: a phrase or sentence (max 12 words, and ideally under 10) suitable for the front of your book. So for example: 'Every family has secrets – some more deadly than others.'

We’re going to be looking for clear and compelling, mixed with a dash of syntactic surprise. A hard task this one, but a goodie.

As soon as you're ready, log into Townhouse and post yours here.

***

That’s it from me. 

Til soon,

Harry.

Julie Hartley, a Canada-based writer of historical fiction, shares her experience of writing for Bookouture.

When I submitted my first novel to Bookouture, a division of Hachette UK, I wasn't fully aware of the difference between digital-first and traditional publishers. I had published three books with independent presses, and I was seeking an agent in the hope that my next novel might find a more global readership. Then, I stumbled on the Bookouture website. I was delighted to see that you could submit to them unagented, and I sent off my manuscript at once.

From submission to publication

The novel I submitted to Bookouture was historical fiction set in occupied France in 1942, and I heard back from them within only a couple of weeks. The acquisitions editor felt the novel was not a fit for their lists, but on the strength of the manuscript she asked if I might be interested in writing something set in England during World War Two. Thrilled, I sent them several synopses, and they selected the two with the strongest hooks.

Publishing companies survive because they know how to sell books, and a strong hook is critical. My first novel for Bookouture, Her Secret Soldier, is about a lonely young woman who discovers an injured German spy in the ancient forest behind her home. She feels compelled to help him, but in doing so risks becoming a traitor to her country. My second novel, The Promise She Made, is about a feisty young girl in 1940 who, desperate to keep her younger sister safe from the Luftwaffe bombs, books passage for them both to Canada against the wishes of her family. Their ship is torpedoed by the Germans in the middle of the Atlantic, with heavy loss of life. A novel must have a strong hook for a publisher to sell it, and my experience with Bookouture taught me digital publishers are no exception.

After several emails and meetings, I received a contract to write both novels. I hadn’t thought such things still happened! However, a shock awaited me when I read the contract. The first novel was to be delivered in just three months.

Digital-first publishers are not a fit for every writer

Writers working with digital publishers often publish two or three books a year, building a brand and a following of loyal readers. Initially I found this pace daunting, but quickly discovered that I absolutely loved it. Writing to a tight deadline means beginning with a detailed plan, at least for me. I brushed up on five act structure and expanded the first synopsis into acts, then chapters, and finally scenes before beginning the first draft.

Every morning for eight weeks I wrote from 5am to 9am and, despite working full time, finished the novel with a week to spare. Meeting a tight deadline meant changing how I worked in other ways, too. My first draft is always handwritten, but there wasn’t time to type in the second draft as I might usually have done, so I tried talk to text. To my surprise, this had a positive impact on my manuscript, since the musicality of a sentence is much more apparent when it is read out loud.

Tight deadlines wouldn’t work for all writers, but I discovered that immersion in the lives of my characters day after day was something I really enjoyed – along with the knowledge that, for the first time, I was writing something that would definitely be published.

A good editor can make or break an experience with a publisher, digital or otherwise

I'm fortunate enough to have a fabulous editor at Bookouture. She is quick to spot structural issues in a manuscript, which is what you need when the deadline is tight – but she is also kind, and she sees the editorial process as a dialogue.  I had initially wondered if the tight publication schedule of a digital-first publisher might mean hasty editing, but this was not the case. My experience with Bookouture has been nothing but positive.

The pros and cons of working with a digital-first publisher

With a traditional publisher it can take years to grow your novel from hook to book, but with a digital publisher the journey is much quicker. In addition, many digital publishers accept submissions from unagented writers. These were both huge positives for me. On the flip side, working with a digital publisher means you don’t see your books in shops, at least initially – something that might be an important consideration for some writers.

It's difficult to say what the future of digital-first publishing will be in an industry that is ever-changing, but for now at least, digital publishers offer writers an additional route to publication – and at a time when it can seem harder than ever before to succeed creatively, this is surely a good thing.

Julie Hartley is the author of two historical novels, both released by Bookouture. She lives in Toronto, Canada where she runs creative writing classes for teens and retreats for adults. You can find Julie's latest novel here. You can also find out more about Julie and her books on her website, and stay up to date with her latest releases via Facebook and Instagram.

Last week, we talked about query letters and I asked you to pop your draft letters up on Townhouse for feedback.

That’s always an illuminating exercise, and on the whole, what I saw was pretty convincing.

But one topic I did want to address was this: your query letter absolutely wants to deliver your core elevator pitch... but you probably don’t want to state your elevator pitch in the letter.

Now yes, that’s sounds puzzling – and I’ll explain – but I should also say that it’s easy to overthink these things. For one thing, personal tastes differ. Some agents will relish what I or other agents would not advise.

More important, though, a query letter itself isn’t terribly important. You need to talk about your book in a way that interests the agent – but the default for an agent is to read the first page or two of your work. It’s way better to have a drab query letter and some excellent opening chapters, than to have a dazzling query letter and drab text. The latter manuscript will never be picked up. The first one almost certainly will be.

So, please don’t get stressed. If you want more help with the query letter, last week's Lesson Three of How to Get a Literary Agent course will tell you EVERYTHING that you need to know. (If you're a Premium Member, log in to access this course for free. Otherwise you can purchase the course for just £99).

OK. So. Elevator pitch and query letter.

As you know, I love a very tight elevator pitch:

“A Cardiff-set crime novel, featuring a detective who used to think she was dead.”

That’s 14 words and I wasn’t even really trying to go as short as possible.

I don’t even mind elevator pitches that just collapse into a list of ingredients. For example, here are some that just list ingredients but still have a relish to them. (The first pitch describes my Fiona series, of course; the other two are just invented.)

“Murder mystery + detective who used to believe she was dead.”

“Antarctic research station + troubled oceanographer + ghosts”

“YA story: Victorian circus + orphan boy + murder story”

But an elevator pitch is, first and foremost, for you. It’s so you can define and understand the purpose of your novel. It’s so you can keep the text on the iron tracks that will deliver commercial (and actually artistic) quality.

From that point of view, the scantier your pitch, the more clearly you yourself understand what you’re dealing with. But a query letter has to dress like a query letter. You can’t just toss out a dozen words, like ham knuckles on a plate, and expect to whet an agent’s appetite.

So you need to introduce your book in a paragraph or two, and those paragraphs need to have nice tidy prose, and they need to ensure that they’re delivering information on genre, and setting, and anything else that an agent might want to know before she tucks into the manuscript.

And the elevator pitch needs to shimmer behind all that – the gold behind the veil.

So to take that (invented) book about the Victorian circus, my query letter might say.

“Oscar is an orphan. He never knew his father and his mother (a lady’s maid) died when he was eight. For two years, he lived a harsh and semi-feral life on the streets of London, until a kindly trapeze artist at one of London’s largest circuses took him in. His life at the circus is comparatively idyllic until one day, when tasked with clearing out the animal cages, he finds evidence that the lions have recently dined on a human – and, quite possibly, Lady Pamela Dulverton, whose recent disappearance is the talk of the town.

Drawn into the resultant investigation, Oscar is forced to grow up fast – and finally learns family secrets that will change his life forever.”

Now, you can absolutely feel the elevator pitch there: Orphan. Victorian circus. Murder. Boom! That’s a book we want to read. The rest of it (the trapeze artist, the lion’s cages, the status of the murder victim) are all just dressing on top of that basic skeleton. If the murder victim had been trampled by an elephant or tossed from a trapeze or skewered by a strongman, it wouldn’t really affect the story. It would be equally unimportant who took Oscar in. The elevator pitch, however, you can’t alter at all without fundamentally changing the story itself.

Oh yes: and the ‘family secrets that change his life forever’ – that’s also not really part of the pitch. Of course, a YA story has to deliver some major form of life-changing outcome, but it doesn’t have to be a family secret. If an orphan came into money or some form of real job security or decided to set up shop as a freelance investigator, any of those things would also complete the story in the necessary way. The pitch is iron and can’t change (unless you decided to write a different story altogether.)

So, the elevator pitch is all present and correct. The agent will feel its presence.

At the same time, you can feel that the extra dressing just helps the pitch appear at its best. It’s as though your query letter is saying, “Look, our pitch is basically orphan + Victorian circus + murder mystery. You gotta love that, right? But if you want help understanding how those ingredients cohere into an actual story, then let me tell you about Oscar, who …”

So, yes, your elevator pitch needs to light up your query letter – it needs to be felt.

But no, the pitch alone is insufficient.

So do what most of the Feedback Friday people did last wee. Write a fluent paragraph or two. Make sure the elevator pitch is there behind the curtain. And write a paragraph that engages the reader.

It’s that simple.

And don’t stress. If you can write a book that’s good enough to be published, you can definitely write a query letter. (And download the query letter and synopsis builder. It’s good.)

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Since we’re doing agent-y things at the moment, we may as well do synopses too.

If you haven’t already posted your query letter for feedback, then I suggest you do that this week here. If you posted your query letter last week, then let’s take a look at your synopsis instead.

I will say that reading back-to-back synopses is a task about as interesting as eating a plateful of brick dust, so I won’t get stuck in too deeply. What I will do, though, is take at least one synopsis from this week's assignment of Lesson Four of How to Get a Literary Agent and give in-depth comments in the forum for that course (and I’ll make my post sticky, so it’s easy to find.)  

***

That’s it from me. Brick dust is yuk, because it lodges between the teeth. A bowlful of gravel though, with fresh milk, and a little grated dandelion? Yum.

Til soon.

Harry

PS: Premium Members have been enjoying our How To Get a Literary Agent course – lessons are released weekly and we’re now on week four, all about how to writing a winning synopsis. The course is free to Premium Members – or you can buy this course as a one-off for £99. But don’t be a silly billy. It makes no sense to buy a one-off course, when you can get an entire suite of courses (and everything else in membership) for just £150 a year (or, for cancel-any-time flex membership, just £30/month.) Membership info here.

Last week, we dealt with hyper-intelligent beings in the form of robots. This week, we turn to… literary agents.

The gist of this email is short and easy.

Agents are there to sell services to you. Over the years, if your career does well, you’ll certainly hope to spend thousands (of pounds or dollars) on those agents. With a little luck, you’ll be spending tens of thousands. If your career really flourishes, you could easily be spending six digits on all that agenting.

Don’t get me wrong, that money is bloody well spent. I’m hardly ill-connected in the world of agents and publishers, and I have in fact sold books for Jericho Writers clients in the past. (Under exceptional circumstances only, and no, I won’t do it for you.) But an agent lives in that market, day in and day out, and there’s no question that they do a better job than I would.

As you know, I’m a big fan of self-publishing and if you want to go that route, you stand an excellent chance of making more money than you would by going trad. But if you do want a traditional publisher, then the 10-15% commission you spend on your agent will be rewarded many times over by the uplift in revenues you’ll collect. I’ve never thought that agents are overpaid.

But – 

You pay these people. They work for you.

And OK, this is a two-way deal. They don’t offer representation unless they think the deal will work out for them. So yes, you have to pass a kind of audition. But in a way that’s even true of plumbers. If they don’t fancy your bathroom renovation job, they either won’t do it, or they’ll quote a sum that induces you to say no.

Forget about the audition stage. It’s irrelevant. These people work for you and, if things work out, they will make a lot of money from you.

So treat them like plumbers, not gods.

If an agent stops responding to perfectly legitimate emails, then they’re behaving childishly and unprofessionally. Move on.

If an agent asks for editorial changes that you’re sure are wrong, say no.

If an agent’s submission process is unnecessarily fiddly or non-standard, then either ignore their requests or choose a different agent.

If an agent’s contract has some pissy little clause that you don’t like or seems unfair, then say so. Negotiate.

Most standard advice tells you to approach an agent with a kind of genuflection in your query letter. (“There are 1400+ literary agents in the world, but I’m writing to YOU because you bedazzle me in the following way …”) And, for me, that’s horse-poo. The things that people say in those letters almost always come over as inauthentic. In most cases, you know pretty much damn all about an agent, and you’re writing to them because you don’t totally hate their face, the agency seems OK, and you’ve got to bang out a dozen query letters anyway. If I were back in agent-querying world, I wouldn’t do that little genuflection. I’d just say, “here’s my book. If you want to represent me, let’s talk.” I mean, I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that, but I wouldn’t curtsy.

Also – send out multiple query letters. Agents used to promote a kind of sequential process: first one agent, then another, then another. That process served their interests very well and yours not at all. You wouldn’t do that with plumbers. Don’t do it with agents.

Ask for information. You should expect to know which editor at which publishing house has received your work. You should expect a submission strategy to be worked out with you in advance. Don’t ask for those things timidly. Expect them. Require them. A plumber needs to check with you before selecting bathware. An agent needs to check with you before selecting editors.

And that’s the message. They’re not gods. They’re plumbers. Expect good behaviour, and you’ll (probably) get it. All being well, you’ll have an excellent professional relationship that lasts for years. You’re paying the money, so you’re within your rights to have expectations.

Ask for what you want.

Be polite and professional.

And don’t curtsy.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Biff boff. Your task this week is to show me your query letter.

Despite what I say above, I’m perfectly happy if you do insert the “I’ve chosen you because….” language. I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s obligatory.

If you’re not at the querying stage, then do the exercise anyway. It’s always helpful to think about your book from an agent’s perspective. When you're ready, share yours here.

That’s it from me.

Til soon,

Harry

Rory Marsden is the self-published author of six books – the first in his series of historical fantasies, Tales of Castle Rory. We caught up with him to ask how he got started with self-publishing, and what he’s learned about the process.

Jericho Writers: Hi Rory, thanks so much for taking part in this Q&A with us! We know lots of people in our community are intrigued by the idea of self-publishing – but many don’t feel confident about trying it. How did you get started?

Rory Marsden: I learnt what to do by taking the amazing Simply Self-Publish course. My tutor was Debbie Young, and the course was invaluable – and not only because of the information it provided and the feedback I received on my assignments. Just as important were Debbie’s gentle encouragement, and her willingness to answer all questions. It was Debbie and her course that gave me the confidence to tackle the whole business, after which I found it isn’t as hard as you think. The course got me started, and now I’m on my own unique journey.

JW: We know lots of people worry that self-publishing means doing absolutely everything yourself. Was that the case for you?

RM: No! First, my books have all been professionally proofread, and they all have professional cover designs. These are important investments; expensive but worth it. For Books one and two, I also paid for professionally formatted interiors, but after that I bought Vellum, a brilliant piece of software, and I’ve formatted all the other books myself. I feel very confident with this now – but of course, it might not be for everyone.

This logic applied to the whole process of self-publishing: at all stages you can choose how much to do yourself and how much to farm out to professionals. The more you do yourself, the less you have to pay, and you really do learn as you go along. If you’re nervous, you can pay other people, and you’ll still retain all your rights.

JW: Are there any things you’d never consider doing yourself?

RM: For me, it’s cover design. A DIY approach for this is a false economy and will come back to bite you. Amateur covers are too obviously just that, though of course if you have graphic design experience you might get away with it! Professional editing or proof-reading is equally essential.

JW: So - once you had your book ready, what was your next step?

RM: I opted to publish through KDP Select, meaning the ebook couldn’t be sold anywhere but on Amazon. However, the paperback can be sold anywhere at all, so I used Draft2Digital, an aggregator that handles making your paperback available from different online retailers.

Being in KDP Select means your books are available to anyone who has signed up for Kindle Unlimited. They can “borrow” your book and read it on their device, and you get royalties for every page they read. I’ve found this works well for my books.

You can get a KDP account set up way in advance of publishing, and then it will be there, ready for you, when you’re poised to publish. I’d advise doing this as soon as you’ve made the decision to self-publish – it’s one less thing to think about further down the line.

JW: What can you tell us about the nitty-gritty of self-publishing – the finer details you’ve had to get to grips with?

RM: I’ve learned an awful lot about how Amazon works! The platform needs to know what it’s selling and who’s likely to buy it. It asks you to select the categories your book fits into, and the keywords customers might put into a search tool when they are looking for books to read. You need to choose these with care, and there’s a limit to how many you can put in. There’s a short cut to researching dozens of similar books, though, and that’s to buy an app called Publisher Rocket. You have to pay for it, so more money going out before anything comes in, but it really does solve the Category and Keyword issue very quickly.

JW: You seem to have picked up a lot of knowledge since starting your self-publishing journey. Have some lessons been harder to learn than others?

RM: Yes! Getting your book up online and available to purchase is only the start, as I have discovered. You see, nobody knows about your book. So, nobody buys it! Amazon gives you thirty days to do something about this. In those thirty days, the Amazon algorithms are working in your favour, pushing your book at anyone who might (in the algorithms’ opinion) be interested. The algorithms work from the categories you’ve selected, and this is why it’s so important to get them right.

After thirty days, if your book isn’t selling, Amazon doesn’t care anymore, and the book is no longer pushed. It’s still available, just not very visible. That’s what happened to me. I had to look into marketing, something I’d never done before.

JW: What happened next?

RM: I was told, by various experts, that most self-published authors are not interested in marketing. They shy away from it, wanting to spend their time writing their books instead. However, self-publishing means understanding that your book is a product. It needs to be marketed efficiently and effectively. You, the author, need to be marketed too. You need a brand, an identity people can connect with, and a story that will resonate. Not the story in your shiny new novel, but the story of you.

I needed help with this and paid for time with a marketing advisor – but if you’ve worked in this sort of field before, you can probably save a lot of money!

JW: In your view, what are the main advantages of self-publishing?

RM: As an independent author, you retain all rights and all control over your manuscript and everything that happens to it. Traditional publishers often offer contracts in which you relinquish rights such as translation into other languages, new editions, new formats, which books might come next in a series, cover design and much else. With self-publishing/independent publishing, it’s all in your control. So, you do all the hard work – but you also get to say what happens, and your royalties per book sale are much greater.

JW: What do you think is the most important self-publishing advice you could share with our community?

RM: Probably that the publishing part of self-publishing – uploading your files to Amazon, for example – is the easy bit! Everything that comes with it is fun, but you need to enjoy the challenges of marketing, branding, selling and so on. I made some bad decisions early on. For example, before I hired my marketing advisor, I spent money on Amazon ads without knowing what I was doing. Most of my other decisions were good ones, thankfully.

You will need to invest in self-publishing – and that’s how to think about it. I considered joining the Simply Self-Publish course the first step on that road, and I’m really glad I took it. I wish anyone else thinking of taking the plunge the very best of luck!

About Rory Marsden

Rory Marsden is the author of a series of Medieval fantasy adventures, the Tales of Castle Rory. You can visit his website at: talesofcastlerory.co.uk and buy his books here.

As a writer of romantic novels, one of my top priorities is making sure sparks fly between my protagonists. My readers expect sizzling chemistry that slow-burns into a satisfying happy ever after – but readers of all genres want to meet people whose relationships they can invest in.  

Whatever genre you’re writing in, creating chemistry between your characters is crucial. Whether you’re working on a dystopian horror novel, a sweeping fantasy trilogy or a gritty crime thriller, it should be as high up your authorial to-do list as mine.  

So, what is chemistry?  

This is a good question. Often, chemistry is one of those ‘you know it when you see it’ things.  

Consider Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, or Harry, Ron and Hermione. Think of the push and pull between the very different Dashwood sisters in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, or the relentless bickering of the many Bridgerton siblings.  

To me, chemistry is the force that animates fictional relationships, taking them from flat to 3D. It’s what makes them feel real and believable, but also what makes them entertaining.  

Establishing effective chemistry really means creating connection between your characters. Often, this link involves recognition and / or resistance. Perhaps the characters see things in one another that they love or hate – or maybe they perceive pieces of themselves in the other person. This might be joyous or deeply disturbing.  

In any case, the most important thing to remember is that chemistry is founded on feelings. It requires characters to provoke strong reactions in one another, whether positive or negative. 

Tried and tested methods for creating chemistry 

1. Equal or opposite responses to events. Whatever type of relationship you’re building between characters, putting them in a tricky situation can pay dividends. Will their problem pull them together? Will it expose the differences between them? If so, good – because conflict is excellent fuel for chemistry.  

On the other hand, perhaps getting out of their pickle will force your characters into a rapprochement that brings them closer. It could help them recognise qualities in one another that they hadn’t known were there.  

Throw your characters into the deep end to test a long-standing relationship or show the formation of a new one. Whether they sink, swim or struggle awkwardly to the side of the pool will help your reader understand who these people are – but also who they are to one another.   

2. Physical touch. In romance novels, physical touch is key to creating chemistry. However, the same logic applies to any genre of novel where there’s a romantic sub-plot. Robert Galbraith’s Strike series is an obvious example.  

Touch doesn’t have to be overtly sexual or gratuitous – it can be a fleeting brush of fingertips or a comforting hug that lasts just a moment too long. The point is for it to evoke emotions that go beyond platonic boundaries.  

Between friends, touch can be grounding: a signal that your character isn’t alone in facing whatever challenge is before them. Touch can also denote a shift in a relationship, from friendship to more or from casual to committed. Never underestimate the significance of one character taking another by the hand.  

3. Little (and large) intimacies. Think in-jokes, nicknames or one character knowing another’s coffee order by heart. All signal connections that can be romantic but don’t have to be.  

In my current work-in-progress, the first thing my protagonist’s best friend – a chef – says to her in chapter one is: ‘Hungry? I’ve saved you a plate with all the good stuff.’ It’s easy, effective shorthand for: ‘I know you and I care about you.’ 

Elsewhere, the delivery of tough love – or the prodding of old wounds – can signal and strengthen characters’ chemistry. When one person knows about another’s painful past or calls them out on their BS, the bond between them becomes clear and feels real. 

Well, golly gosh, I thought last week’s Feedback Friday was interesting - and brave for the good souls who took part.

We asked people to post an excerpt from their manuscript – plus the same scene, as delivered by an AI tool. (You can see the full results here, and I do urge you to take a look. If the link gives you a “whoops” message, that’s because you’re not a member, or not logged in. So either log in, or join us completely free. You get load of good stuff if you do.)

Just for fun, here’s part of the scene that I posted. Fiona (a police officer, but working undercover) is meeting a senior member of a criminal gang she is seeking to penetrate. They meet in a wine bar:

My version of the scene

Vic emerges from behind a raw oak pillar. My face must change somehow, because the waiter swings round, sees Vic. Some look is exchanged, and the waiter waves me over to where Vic has a table waiting.

‘You made it,’ he says.

He clucks around me, a fussy uncle. He wants me to remove my coat, but I keep it on. Take off my hat, but keep it close.

He wants me to choose a drink. Pushes a long wine list at me, tells me to order anything. I ask for water. He tells me again to order anything, meaning that water doesn’t count, so I say orange juice, a small one.

He orders another glass of red wine for him, a bowl of olives, toasted ciabatta slices and olive oil, a selection of antipasti, and my orange juice.

I sit there with my bag on my lap. The bag is wired for sound. So is my coat.

‘Filthy day, isn’t it? I don’t mind it cold, but this is vile.’

I don’t say anything. Maybe shrug. Look sideways.

‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’

AI version of scene

The soft clink of wine glasses blended with murmured conversations around me. I’d chosen my outfit carefully – a worn blazer and faded jeans that screamed low-wage worker, a direct contrast to the polished mahogany and crystal elegance of the wine bar. Vic sat across from me, his pinstripe suit a silent declaration of power.

“You’ve got a reputation for being… resourceful,” he said, swirling a glass of Cabernet. His steel-gray eyes never left my face, measuring and calculating. I could feel the weight of his assessment.

I kept my posture slightly hunched, the defeated stance of someone desperate for work. “I go where I’m needed,” I replied, my voice low and neutral. “Cleaning’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills.”

A thin smile crossed his lips – predatory, knowing.

Comments on this

For me, the AI scene is desperately crude. Conversations (inevitably) are murmured. Wine glasses (inevitably) clink softly. The bar is (for sure) polished mahogany, even though that wood feels like a somewhat Victorian choice; it certainly isn’t high style today. And of course the eyes are steel-grey and calculating.

The trouble here is that there’s no sub-text. The reader isn’t being asked to do any work at all. “Hmm, I wonder how we should think about Vic Henderson? Well, he’s predatory and calculating so he’s probably Bad News, right?”

That’s so crude.

My version of the same man is almost the opposite. He clucks around Fiona like a fussy uncle. He nudges her into ordering something. And he accepts blame for her feelings: ‘Listen, love, you’re frightened, aren’t you? And that’s my fault. I think I frightened you yesterday. Let’s just get to know each other a bit maybe.’

But the reader knows this isn’t the whole Henderson. Not only do we know for a fact that he’s the face of a criminal enterprise, but we see him rejecting her request for water. There’s compulsion here and it’s the compulsion that we feel.

Some of the comments on this pair of scenes was:

• “the AI writing here isn’t good. I don’t think it has the capacity to be indirect. It overexplains with tired language. And it has that generic voice.”
• “There is always a lot of telling description that gives AI away. ‘Low and neutral’ ‘ thin smile’ ‘predatory’ ‘hands trembled’. The revised version has a lot of flowery descriptions. However, with your excerpt, we are picking up things as readers and not being told what to think.”

I think those comments are just right.

And just to finish, here’s a chunk (edited for length) from Sally Roone’s Intermezzo. The monologue comes from Ivan, a gifted chess player. He’s watching an arts centre get set up for a 10 vs 1 chess tournament, where Ivan is the 1. He then meets Margaret, the attractive arts centre organiser.

Sally Rooney / Intermezzo

Standing on his own in the corner, Ivan thinks with no especially intense focus about the most efficient way of organising, say, a random distribution of tables and chairs into the aforementioned arrangement of a central U-shape, etc. It’s something he has thought about before, while standing in other corners, watching other people move similar furniture around similar indoor spaces: the different approaches you could use, say if you were writing a computer programme to maximise process efficiency. The accuracy of these particular men in relation to the moves recommended by such a program would be, Ivan thinks, pretty low, like actually very low…

A woman enters. She happens to be noticeably attractive, which makes her presence in the room at this juncture all the more curious. She has a nice figure and her face in profile looks very pretty … She works here, the woman named Margaret, here at the art centre: that explains her sort of artistic appearance. She's wearing a white blouse, and a voluminous patterned skirt in different colours, and neat flat shoes of the kind ballerinas wear. He begins to experience, while she stands there in front of him, an involuntary mental image of kissing her on the mouth: not even really an image, but an idea of an image, sort of a realisation that it would be possible to visualise this at some later point, what it would be like to kiss her, a promise of enjoyment simply to picture himself doing that, which is harmless enough, just a private thought.

Do you play chess? he asks.

Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is a chess geek.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan is certain to be awkward around women.” Nowhere does this say, “Ivan will not come across as sexually impressive.” But we know immediately that all these things are true. We also know that Ivan would slaughter us at chess and also be far more likely to remember the formula for a Gaussian probability distribution.

The point here is that the reader is being made to work. They have to bring their own knowledge of the world (geeky men / arts centre-y women) and build out their understanding of the scene from facts they’ve acquired about the world. The AI text almost assumes that we have no knowledge of the world, so if an observation isn’t in the text, it doesn’t exist.

But it does exist! It’s the most interesting part of the text. The joy of reading Sally Rooney isn’t Sally Rooney text alone. It’s ‘Sally Rooney text plus our own human wisdom.’ A robot couldn’t read Sally Rooney and form any real sense of what makes it worthwhile.

You don’t believe me? Well, I asked a robot to ‘rewrite and improve’ Rooney’s passage. The result is in the PS below. But suffice to say – I do not love it.

And nor should you.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

OK, here’s a rather different task from what I normally hand out – but still on the theme of this email and the last.

• Post a 200-250 word excerpt from your manuscript
• In [square brackets and italics] add your comments wherever you detect the kind of subtext that you would not expect a robot to pick up.

Once you're ready, log in to Townhouse and post yours here.

I’m going to like the excerpts that have lots of italics!

***

That’s it from me.

My massive Viking longship was handed in to school and duly admired. It’s now sitting in my garage. When summer comes, I’m going to find a petite red-headed Viking and launch her off into the biggest lake or river I can find. The ship is papier-mache and is likely to dissolve, but wotthehell. The Vikings sailed to America, right? I reckon they’ll manage the Thames.

Til soon.

Harry

***

PS: Here’s the AI version of that Sally Rooney passage: which scrubs all subtext with a total lack of self-reflection. Ms Rooney has nothing to worry about just yet:

Standing in the corner, Ivan observed the chaotic rearrangement of furniture with detached analytical interest. His mind, perpetually seeking patterns, calculated the optimal sequence for transforming this random scatter of tables and chairs into the intended U-shape. It was a familiar mental exercise—one he often entertained while occupying the margins of rooms like this, watching people execute with human imprecision what could be solved with algorithmic elegance. He estimated the efficiency of these particular men at perhaps thirty percent of optimal—their movements dictated by intuition rather than calculation, by conversation rather than silent computation.

A woman entered the space, and Ivan's algorithmic thinking stuttered. Her presence was an unexpected variable in what had been, until now, a predictable equation. She moved with confidence through the disarray, her figure drawing his attention with a force that felt almost mathematical in its inevitability. Her profile cut a precise silhouette against the institutional wall—high cheekbones, a determined chin, eyes focused on something beyond the immediate disorder.

Margaret, he recalled from the program. She worked at the art center—an explanation for both her presence and the deliberate aesthetic of her appearance. Her white blouse provided sharp contrast to the chromatic explosion of her skirt, which moved like liquid as she navigated between half-arranged furniture. Her ballet flats made no sound on the floor, adding to the impression that she floated slightly above the mundane proceedings.

Without warning, his mind produced not an explicit image but a theoretical construct—a placeholder for a potential visualization involving the pressing of his lips against hers. Not even a fantasy so much as a mathematical proof of a fantasy's possibility: If x equals proximity and y equals mutual attention, then z could equal... He felt a curious satisfaction at the mere architecture of this thought, this harmless private equation that would never require solving.

"Do you play chess?" he asked, the question emerging from some calculation deep beneath his consciousness, a gambit whose purpose even he couldn't fully articulate.